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 ...

When I teach I have to set my fonts really big so that folks in the back can see. I show PowerShell from time to time, and people keep asking me about my latest prompt.  Here’s what my prompt looks like:   { univac\Buck on UNIVAC using AMD64 } --    12/23/2009 7:54:10 ...

In working on a PowerShell script to load data into SQL Server, I decided to use the Invoke-SQLCMD cmdlet included in the snapins provided with SQL Server 2008, and found a couple of issues you should know about. First, as a matter of best practices, if a stored procedure returns a scalar value, it should do so in an output parameter. The ...

I just learned about a Connect item entered on Friday: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=475337. Here's the description in the item. Please invoke the full powershell not a ''mini-shell''. Powershell is very powerful but the mini-shell you get when invoking Powershell from the Management Studio ...

My first whitepaper for Microsoft, Understanding and Using PowerShell Support in SQL Server 2008 has been published. It was a great honor to have been selected to write the paper, and I thank Kalen Delaney for giving me the opportunity. I hope you find it useful. Allen

The Enterprise Policy Management Framework version 3.0, a new version of the framework to support policy automated policy evaluation for SQL Server 2000 and 2005, has been posted to codeplex. For those who are not familiar with the tool, the Enterprise Policy Management Framework is a reporting solution on the state of the SQL Server enterprise ...

The next version of the Enterprise Policy Management Framework has been published to CodePlex.  The new version includes error trapping and error reporting, and a few bug fixes.  Please be sure to download the documentation as well, which will help you understand how to use the PowerShell variables to scale the execution in your ...

A year ago in anticipation of publishing a book on SMO (which never came to be) I wrote a number of chapters demonstrating how to manage specific sets of objects, and I provided examples in VB.Net, C# and PowerShell. As should be expected, I thoroughly tested all of the code samples to make sure they worked. This year I've been part a couple of ...

Microsoft included PowerShell with SQL Server 2008, and the new sqlps.exe program which includes the SQL PowerShell drivers including the PS Drives and new cmdlets for SQL Server. I prefer to work from vanilla PowerShell and load the assemblies I need, so I have code at the start of my script to load the appropriate assemblies. When I started ...

Errors occur. (I'm sure that's someone's corollary to Stuff Happens.) Errors occur, and that's why we write error handling code in our applications. My least favorite time for the occurrance of errors is when I'm doing demos, and that's what happened in a presentation I did at PASS last week. I try to test everything before giving the demos, ...