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 …

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. …

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: …