When someone asks about SQL Server architecture, the reflexive answer is usually 'High Availability,' as if it's a requirement rather than a choice. But after 20 years of managing SQL Server environments, I've found that HA often creates more problems than it solves, especially in certain types of organizations. The …

TLDR: dbatools is moving to Azure Trusted Signing, which means Microsoft backs our reputation and dbatools won't trigger as many antivirus false positives. Users upgrading from older signed versions will need -SkipPublisherCheck only once during the initial transition. PowerShell users with strict ExecutionPolicies …

Incredible! I just used PowerShell and OpenAI to import text from a PDF right into SQL Server 🚀 AI's usefulness is often debated but this is such a great use-case. I also see it being useful for automatically adding SharePoint document metadata and cleaning dirty data. Using a new feature from OpenAI called …

TLDR: This error is expected and the change is legitimate. To update, switch to Install-Module, then slap on the -SkipPublisherCheck and -Force parameters and continue your update. 1Install-Module dbatools -Force -SkipPublisherCheck I've always been very proud that dbatools is Code Signed like a "real" …

If you're wondering about the uptick in SQL Server-related posts, I recently changed jobs and went back to being a SQL Server DBA. For a few years there, I switched to security engineering; I figured I'd try something new and welcomed no longer being an admin. It was nice enough and I got to do a ton of PowerShell, but …

If you work in an offline environment, you're probably familiar with how painful it can be to install anything, including PowerShell modules like dbatools. In the past, dbatools had no dependencies, so the installation process was somewhat straightforward — you could even download a zip from our GitHub repo. However, …

Note: This blog post is going to borrow a bit from Microsoft's official documentation in "Connect with Azure Data Studio" and from our book, Learn dbatools in a Month of Lunches. It also addresses dbatools 2.0. Update, 2025: dbatools 2.0 has since shipped and the guidance below still applies. Newer SSMS …

So much is new and different! If you'd like to try it while you read this blog post, you can currently install dbatools 2.0 by executing the following command: 1Install-Module dbatools Requirements dbatools still works on PowerShell v3 an v4! Thanks to Microsoft for making that possible with SMO. PowerShell v5.1 is …

Years ago before I learned PowerShell, I was using T-SQL to do things it just wasn't meant to do, namely SQL Server estate management. T-SQL is incredibly efficient when managing data, but it's not very efficient when managing SQL Server instances. For example, say you need to perform a task against each database. The …

This post is about Import-DbaCsv, a command within the dbatools PowerShell module for SQL Server. I've been writing about CSV imports using PowerShell for a pretty long time and in VBScript for even longer. Initially, my primary concerns were ease-of-use and speed. Over time, I realized that what mattered most was: …