Powershell

The week of PASS Data Community Summit 2024 (November 4-8), Bluesky seemed to reach critical mass with the data community as well as the tech community writ large. Over the week, I saw a few posts (“skeets” I guess?) from Jeff Hicks saying that he was working on a PowerShell module for Bluesky. I said to myself “interesting, I’ll keep an eye on that.”

On the evening of November 11th, Jeff posted that he needed help troubleshooting an apparent issue on macOS.

Sometimes, work tasks and questions that come up in the SQL Server Community Slack coincide.

A couple weeks ago, DrData asked

With SET STATISTICS IO ON, is there really no way to show the TOTALS at the bottom? There are some nice tools like StatisticsParser but it sure would be nice to see the totals of all values right at the bottom, especially when there are many tables.

The task at hand in the office was a need to do the same thing, but with SET STATISTICS TIME ON. So I got to thinking…I can PowerShell my way through this, right?

The Problem

While performing an instance migration this spring, I happened upon something I didn’t expect in dbatools. It should have been a simple backup/restore copy of the databases, with the backup files residing on a fileshare on the destination server after being copied there. I kept getting a warning that the backup files I was attempting to restore couldn’t be read, and the restores (via Restore-DbaDatabase) wouldn’t execute.

I checked permissions on the server over and over again. Both on the filesystem and for the share that I was attempting to read from. Even more curious, if I executed the restore database statements directly from within Management Studio, the databases restored without issue.

The Prompt

In July, Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) asked us to make September Community Tools Awareness Month.

In September, I want you to improve community knowledge about one free tool that you rely on every week in order to get your job done.

I’m sure it will come as no surprise to readers of this blog, but I’m going to select the amazing PowerShell module dbatools.

dbatools Is for Everyone

Despite what the name may imply, dbatools is a valuable toolkit for anyone who needs to interact with SQL Server. It’s not just about upgrades and migrations anymore. I like to tell people it’ll make them look like a wizard to their colleagues because of how quickly things can get done with just a few commands.

A collection of the resources mentioned in my PASS Data Community Summit session Backup Basics with PowerShell and dbatools, including bonus content!

Over the summer, I spent some (a lot of) time working on updates to a script at work which runs multiple processes in parallel. Everything seemed to work OK for a while, but then everything broke. It broke right around the time dbatools 1.1 dropped, so I started thinking that something must have changed there. As it turns out, it was entirely my fault and I hope this post will help you avoid the same trap.

I am thrilled to announce that I will be speaking at this year’s PASS Data Community Summit! This year’s event runs November 8th through 12th. I am thrilled to announce that I will be speaking at this year’s PASS Data Community Summit!

I had the honor of presenting a new session, Backup Basics with PowerShell and dbatools, at the first Ohio North Database Training meeting this evening. Thank you to the group leaders for the opportunity and to everyone who attended.

Because this was both a brand new session and an attempt at a new way of delivering the presentation, I had a couple tech glitches but things went pretty well once they were understood and ironed out. Definitely room for improvement next time!

A former colleague emailed me with a question about retaining/fixing database users and permissions after restoring a database. They were copying a database from one instance to another, with different logins, users, and permissions between the two instances. Backup & restore to copy the database is easy enough, but because users & permissions are kept inside the database itself, the destination environment loses all its permissions settings in the process. What to do?

I’ve been meaning to write something this post for a while but the stars have aligned this week. Garry Bargsley (blog | twitter) published a post about making a schema-only copy of a database on the day that I needed to solve that exact problem. But that’s not what this is about. It’s just a convenient way to demonstrate this shortcut.

I’m sure that a lot of folks do work on the PowerShell command line, trying various things, before committing to writing a full script or function. Work it out step by step, try a few different things, etc. But once you’ve finished, how can you turn it into a script? Let’s take a look.