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 …

Here are two straight-forward ways to create Scheduled Tasks within Windows using PowerShell. One script creates a PowerShell Scheduled Job, and the other creates a classic Windows Scheduled Task. You can read about the differences here. PowerShell v3 and above required. Create a Scheduled Job The following script …

Microsoft ConnectM isn't letting me sign in to post this workaround, but I just ran into a bug with the OleDbProviderSettings within SMO. To get around it, I used $server.Settings.OleDbProviderSettings instead of $server.OleDbProviderSettings 1$server.Settings.OleDbProviderSettings.Name.Contains("SQLOLEDB") …

Tonight, I published Invoke-Locate.ps1 to ScriptCenter because I was tired of mounting my Windows drive to my Linux servers to quickly and reliably find files. Originally, it was going to be a small script, but then I decided to trick it out, add an installer and automatic Task Scheduling to run updatedb. The installer …

I'm currently working on a PowerShell/SQL set of scripts to ease SQL Server Migrations. A few of the scripts have been posted to Microsoft's ScriptCenter. Recently, one of the ScriptCenter visitors asked: Can this script be used to backup all server configuration and restore at a later date. The use case I have is that …

About 8 years ago, I wrote a blog post that provided a VBScript to create easy-to-read shortcuts to IIS Log directories. W3SVC56 just wasn't helpful enough to identify which website logs to which directory. Today, I ported that same script to PowerShell. I'm too lazy to explain, so this is what it does: Easy peasy. …

A buddy of mine was running into issues importing a 1 GB CSV of Longitudes and Latitudes available from geonames.org. The CSV contains over 9 million rows, and no matter what he did, DTS/SSIS would not import the data because of conversion issues. That's actually been happening to me a lot lately, too, so I find myself …

I'm not super familiar with ThinApping, but converted portions of this VMware login script at the request of a consultant. I tried to automate the script a bit more than the one from VMware's blog. Their script required that you put in the path to each EXE. This script will find all exes within a directory and register …

Recently, while trying to use New-WebServiceProxy to automate some SharePoint form entries, I ran into a lookup issue. First, I got this rather generic error: Exception calling "GetListItems" with "7" argument(s): "Exception of type 'Microsoft.SharePoint.SoapServer.SoapServerException' was …