I read Jeffery Hicks’ article in this month’s Redmond Magazine on a new add-in for Windows PowerShell 2.0. It’s called the PowerShell Pack and it has a some great new features that I plan to put into place on my production systems as soon as I finished learning and testing them. You can download the pack here if you have PowerShell 2.0. I’m ...

Don’t be afraid of that title – I’m not talking about Six Sigma or anything super-formal here. In many organizations, there are more folks in other IT roles than in the Data Professional area. In other words, there are more developers, system administrators and so on than there are the “DBA” role. That means we often have more to do than the ...

Using the Server Management Objects (SMO) library, you don’t even need to have the SQL Server 2008 PowerShell Provider to read the SQL Server Error Logs – in fact, you can use regular old everyday PowerShell. Keep in mind you will need the SMO libraries – which can be installed separately or by installing the Client Tools from the SQL Server ...

Whew!  That’s a mouthfull. Anyway, I thought I would share part of a script I wrote today to help automate (more) from PowerShell. This assumes a few things: that you’re doing this from the SQL Server 2008 PowerShell provider (not just good old regular PowerShell) and that you change the HAL9000 and SQL2K8 parts with your server name and your ...

Most data professionals I’ve met work in two modes: we plan for our day, and we react to the situations around us. I’m staring at my list of things that I need to do today right now, which is my planned work. Of course, I have no idea how much of that will really get done – it’s optimistic to be sure. On the other hand I have several systems I ...

It’s not hard to get Performance Monitor counters in PowerShell 1.0, and it’s REALLY easy in 2.0. This is one I used yesterday to monitor network bytes in and out on 2.0 (keep all of the green lines in this post on the same line) : get-counter -Counter "\Network Interface(*)\Bytes Total/sec" -SampleInterval 1 -MaxSamples ...

In SQL Server, there are times that you need to do things in the operating system, and to allow that there is a feature called CmdExec. This is not always a good thing –whenever you leave the confines of SQL Server and go out to the operating system, you can cause issues, not the least of which are security-related. This best practice is ...