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.

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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
 7 …

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 …