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 …

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 …

After a December 2013 patching downtime, I noticed an abrupt decrease of almost 50% in the performance of 2 SQL Servers. Both servers were running on HP DL580 G7s. After many hours of testing and data collection, we finally updated the BIOS firmware from 7/01/2013 to 10/31/2013. The issue immediately resolved itself. …

I've always found basic administration of SQL Server to be fairly straight-forward, but for a long while, I felt very uneasy about troubleshooting SQL Server performance issues. Any DBA knows that the most productive periods of learning arise when there are problems. For the past few months, I've been trying to track …

Recently, we decided to buy a few licenses of Confio Ignite (Now SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor) to monitor some of our high-profile SQL Servers. I'm definitely not posting a sales pitch, but for me, it's provided insight into SQL Server that is much more difficult to obtain through traditional methods. One of …