Powershell

Earlier this week I was working on adding a new feature to Update-DbaTools and while looking at another cmdlet to check syntax/conventions, I noticed an ugly typo in some of the help for it. 100% perfect prose isn’t necessary in the comment-based help for PowerShell cmdlets, but seeing misspellings and such kind of bugs me. Fortunately this is something I can help fix since the module is on Github.

First I needed to find a spell-checker that works with Visual Studio Code to help me spot misspellings. This was slightly trickier than expected, as I use macOS at home and at least one of the first plugins I found was Windows-only. I finally settled on Code Spellchecker.

Recently I was working on a bit of PowerShell to download the awesome First Responder Kit from Brent Ozar Unlimited. The canonical URL for the FRK is http://firstresponderkit.org/ but that’s a redirect to the GitHub repository where all the magic happens. I thought to myself:

Self! Rather than take a chance on that GitHub URL changing, use the “main” URL and Invoke-WebRequest will take care of the redirect for you.

So off to the PowerShell prompt I went and ran Invoke-WebRequest -Uri http://firstresponderkit.org/ to start looking at the object returned so I could see what I needed to parse out to find my way to the true download URL.

In a previous post, I expressed some frustration over Invoke-SqlCmd not setting an Application Name for its ODBC connection, leaving us with the generic .NET SqlClient Library when looking at active sessions in sp_who2 and sp_whoisactive (and any other monitoring tool). Unfortunately, I can’t really do anything about Invoke-SqlCmd aside from posting a suggestion on Connect or the Client Tools Trello board, but Invoke-SqlCmd2 has the same issue and that’s on GitHub. So, here we go!

Odds are, you’ve got more than one application or script accessing your database or SQL Server instance at any given time. You’re probably stacking them on a small number of servers in an attempt to cut down on licensing costs and resource usage. All those PowerShell scripts running on the central job server are running under a single service account, and you’ve got a lazy vendor who set up both the website and back-end application server to run under the same account, maybe even on a single app/web server.

Slides & demos from my SQL Saturday Rochester presentation “Easing into Scripting with Windows PowerShell” have been posted on the SQL Saturday site.

Thank you to everyone who came out for my session and all of SQL Saturday!

Watching all of the tweets as people posted their first entries in the SQL New Blogger Challenge earlier this week, I quickly realized that keeping up was going to be a challenge of its own. Fortunately, there are ways to reign it in.

My first stop was IFTTT (If This Then That). IFTTT allows you to create simple “recipes” to watch for specific events/conditions, then perform an action. They have over 175 “channels” to choose from, each of which has one or more triggers (events) and actions. I have IFTTT linked to both my Google and Twitter accounts, which allowed me to create a recipe which watches Twitter for the #sqlnewblogger hashtag, and writes any tweets that match it to a spreadsheet on my Google Drive account (I’ll make the spreadsheet public for now, why not?).

This post is part of Ed Leighton-Dick’s SQL New Blogger Challenge. Please follow and support these new (or reborn) bloggers.

I’m working with a number of SQLite databases as extra data sources in addition to the SQL Server database I’m primarily using for a project. Brian Davis (blog|twitter) wrote a blog post a few years ago that covers setting up the connection quite well. In my case, I’ve got nine SQLite databases to connect to, and that gets tedious. PowerShell to the rescue!

On Thursday, February 26th I presented “Easing Into Windows PowerShell” to a packed house at the Rochester SQL Server User Group meeting. Thanks to Matt Slocum (blog | twitter) for being my semi-official photographer.

Presenting Easing Into Windows PowerShell at the Rochester SQL Server User Group February 26, 2015

We set a chapter attendance record! I had a lot of fun presenting this (my first time speaking outside my company) and we had some great conversations during and after the meeting.

On Thursday, February 26th at 6:00 PM EST I will be speaking at the Rochester PASS chapter meeting. The topic is “Easing Into PowerShell - What’s It All About?”.

You’ve been hearing a lot about Windows PowerShell, but you’re wondering if it’s something you should be looking into. In this introductory session, we’ll talk about what PowerShell is, where it came from, how it works, and what it can do for you. Whether you’re a junior DBA or seasoned veteran, you’ll find something that PowerShell can help you do easier.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a Windows Update go bad - until this week.

I recently upgraded to Office 2013 and late Monday afternoon, decided to check in with Windows Update prior to our company’s normal monthly patching to see how bad the damage would be. Nearly 1 GB of updates, thanks to my fresh Office install. But there were also a couple optional updates, including a .NET Framework update. So I figured I may as well go ahead and do everything while I was at it. This way I could control the reboot instead of being forced into one in the middle of important tasks.