Recently, I did a webcast for the PowerShell Virtual Chapter of PASS on Simplifying SQL Server Migrations using PowerShell. If you're planning for a SQL Server migration, I wrote a bunch of scripts that can help, and put them all on github. Check out the sqlmigration repository, and the accompanying PowerPoint Slides. …

I just released a new PowerShell script, Get-SQLServerKeys.ps1. The script works works with several versions of SQL Server (2005-2014), and can use Central Management Server, a text file, or just a string of servers as input. Like many of the Windows Key scripts available, this one relies on Remote Registry being …

I'm currently attending Regis University for my grad degree, and just finished up a networking class. For my final, I chose to explore the Windows Net.TCP Port Sharing Service. I had this glorious vision of translating some C# code to 100% PowerShell code, but eventually gave into the fact that PowerShell doesn't …

As a SQL Server DBA, I'm used to SQL being able to perform aliasing, super fast subselects, and easy aggregation. My most recent project, Invoke-Locate.ps1, however, uses SQLite because of its portability and speed when performing simple selects and inserts. The downside is that SQLite doesn't handle some subselects …

This is mostly for my reference, but you can use it, too :) Create Basic Datatable 1$dt = New-Object System.Data.Datatable 2[void]$dt.Columns.Add("First") 3[void]$dt.Columns.Add("Second") 4[void]$dt.Columns.Add("Third") 5 6# Add a row manually …

Update 1/4: Removed conversion of datatable to list. That just wasted memory, as this works on all enumerables. I don't have a practical application for this method, but I wanted to figure out how to do it anyway. Doing so was frustrating but kinda fun. It forced me to learn about lamdas in PowerShell which I'll …

If you've ever tried to use PowerShell's Import-CSV with large files, you know that it can exhaust all of your RAM. Previously, I created a script on ScriptCenter that used an alternative technique to import large CSV files, and even imported them into SQL Server at a rate of 1.7 million rows a minute. I've now gotten …

Update 1/18/2015: This native PowerShell script can process over 165,000 rows a second. I'm so pumped. My million row CSV with 9k dupes processed in 6.4 seconds. I actually tried this using LINQ in PowerShell, but it seemed exponetially slower as the dataset grew. A user on reddit's PowerShell subreddit asked for the …

Last year, I finally started working with SMO (SQL Management Objects) within PowerShell and I absolutely love it. Below are a few recipes that I created and use extensively throughout my SQL Management scripts, which you can find on ScriptCenter. Some recipes show more than one way to perform a task. These SMO recipes …

While researching how connect to a detached MDF and read the internal file structure of the internal files, including LDF files, I kept seeing suggestions for using the undocumented DBCC command DBCC checkprimaryfile. Initially, my code looked like this: 1# SQL Server is required to read the file contents 2$servername …