Wow, it's been a crazy month! Two weeks of Tech Ed in Orlando, where I spent time helping people with questions on SQL Server in the Database Platform area and presented two sessions on SMO and PowerShell (one with my friend Peter Ward from Australia). Then, my last week as a DBA at Advanstar, followed by my first week as a Trainer for ...

In my previous blog I reviewed the different policy evaluation modes available in SQL Server 2008.  In this next installment I will detail how to initiate a policy on demand using PowerShell. PowerShell integration with SQL Server 2008 is getting more press lately.  In past blogs I noted a few resources to help learn PowerShell, and ...

Last week I presented a session on Using SMO to Manage SQL Server at SQL Connections in Orlando, Florida. This was the third major conference I've presented this session, and each time I do this session I change more demos from VB.Net to PowerShell. This time it was the demo to create a new database. The big thing about my demos is that I want ...

PowerShell is all the rage!  It is deeply integrated in SQL Server 2008, where you can start a PowerShell session from Management Studio, and create job steps which execute PowerShell scripts.  SQL Server 2008 will also introduce some great new cmdlets.  This integration of PowerShell in SQL Server 2008 will introduce a number of ...

In the February CTP of SQL Server 2008 a new feature has appeared in SQL Server Management Studio. You now have the ability to right-click on an object in the Object Explorer window and open up a PowerShell window. In this window you can navigate the database structures much like you can a disk file subsystem, or like you can navigate the ...

Last week I posted about using PowerShell and SQL Server together, and I used a SQLDataAdapter and populated a DataTable with the results. This approach is fine if what you're doing returns a reasonably small resultset, but what if you're returning millions of rows. In this case a DataTable isn't too practical, and a forward-only DataReader is ...

I've mentioned before my company manages trade shows, and we've got a series of web sites managed by an application which uses a different SQL Server database for each site, with a master database (I'll call it Global, to differentiate it from SQL Server's master database). Well, we have a number of shows which have multiple show locations, and ...

Actually, let's use PowerShell and SMO to create an Agent job which will run a PowerShell script. (Or is that a circular reference?) I've created a number of PowerShell scripts which automate database management processes, and I wanted to be able to run them from an Agent job. The trick, of course, is to be able to get to the PowerShell ...

While doing some research on SMO I found a couple of very handy features of the WMI accessibility features of SMO. I'm playing with PowerShell because it's easy to browse the SMO objects in that environment, but here are a couple of tips I found useful. We need to load the SMO assembly into PowerShell - here's the ...