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 …

I recently got into VS Code Dev Containers and Azure Functions, and I love them. Unfortunately, the PowerShell Azure Functions pretty much come out of the box with a high likelihood of throwing Ominsharp exceptions when debugging.

Two of the files the setup process generates, launch.json and tasks.json, use the func …

I've been super busy with a couple projects (including dbatools 2.0, which will be GA soon) and hadn't kept up with much, but I got a notification on my phone for an article on infoworld.com that talked about a new GitHub Copilot feature in VS code called Copilot chat.

While reading the article, I got the feeling that …

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, which is currently in pre-release.

Microsoft recently made some changes to the default encryption …

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 …

I cannot believe my eyes.

I imagine some PowerShellers will disagree with me but when developing modules that support older versions of PowerShell, I refuse to even try to support Core vs Desktop in my module manifest. I imagine this will be the case for the next decade or two.

I've been working on dbatools 2.0 for a …

I've been trying for years to get dbatools to import faster. There's a lot of plain-text code to import and even more help. Binary modules like Microsoft's SqlServer module benefit from prior compilation and can be imported in like 500-900ms whereas dbatools generally takes 2-5 seconds.

I've written about module …

When I first joined Mastodon, I was excited to learn that fedifinder and debirdify can help find my Twitter friends on Mastodon. Both are web-based tools that search your follows and/or followers on Twitter for possible Mastodon accounts, then export the results to a CSV file.

First thing I'd recommend doing? Find your …

After moving from Twitter to Mastodon, I wrote a blog post about how aliases can help us keep a consistent social media presence even if we change servers.

This means that even though dbatools is currently using the fosstodon.org server as [email protected], I'll be linking [email protected] on all of our …