While preparing for a presentation at PASS next month I tested my PowerShell script to back up user databases on a server. This script has been running flawlessly against SQL Server 2005 for a couple of years, so I was really surprised when PowerShell returned a screen full of errors and no backups. What slipped my mind was something I'd ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...