Each morning when I get into the office, I check performance graphs in SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA - formerly Confio Ignite). Monday mornings are usually the most important, because I run full system maintenance on a specific monitored database on Sunday. Monday is the first day of heavy utilization …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …