If you’ve used Out-File, Set-Content or Add-Content to create a SQL file, you may notice that SQL Server Management Studio complains about normalizing the line breaks.

If you see this, simply using -Encoding UTF8 for your output instead of ASCII, the default, will solve the problem.

Today’s blog post is part of T-SQL Tuesday. T-SQL Tuesday is the brainchild of Adam Machanic. It is a monthly blog party on the second Tuesday of each month. Everyone is welcome to participate.

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Koen Verbeeck (blog | twitter), is all about how technology has changed a lot in the past years and the potential impact these changes will have on SQL Server Pros.

In Koen’s invitation, he specifically called out the cloud, globalization and automation.

The Cloud

When it comes to the cloud, I think on-prem is still a safe bet and will be for at least another decade.

My first bill from Amazon Web Services arrived nearly ten years ago on June 1, 2007 (it was for $0.61, not bad). Since then, I’ve played in the cloud off and on, and was even the technical editor for a book about Automating Microsoft Azure with PowerShell. When it comes to work work, however, everything is still on-prem. Similarly, my awesome homelab is tucked safely in a storage room at my house.

Ultimately, when it comes to the cloud, I think it’ll be at least another 10-15 years before a majority of organizations fully move away from on-prem. And as they do, I’ll go along with them, but like many organizations, I’m in no rush. The “Datacenter” in my Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP is strong.

At the same time, I know that my varied systems background lends itself to the confidence that I can adjust to cloud movement with no issues. I’d encourage DBAs with a weak systems background invest more time into understanding their whole environment and not just SQL Server itself.

Globalization

Is this offshoring? If so, I’ve seen situations where it’s worked, and situations where it hasn’t. I’m not really concerned.

Automation

Y’all know what I’m gonna say here! I love automation and PowerShell. I know for a fact that PowerShell and T-SQL together are the future of SQL Server administration. As someone who often presents about dbatools, the popular SQL PowerShell community project, I’ve seen the excitement and relief that PowerShell automation brings to SQL Server Database Pros.

From making it way easier to migrate entire instances to automating backup testing and verification, PowerShell makes it straight up more enjoyable to be a DBA.

Backups

For years, I’ve used Ola Hallengren’s Maintenance Solution, but I always found it stressful to know that at each location, I’d have to spend a chuck of time working on the process to perform restores as required.

What happens if an entire instance goes down? Now, thanks to Stuart Moore, restoring the most recent database backups to another instance is as easy as

Get-ChildItem \nas\sql\sql2016 | Restore-DbaDatabase -SqlInstance sql2016a -MaintenanceSolutionBackup

What about logins with their passwords, SIDS, permissions and all that? I export every login within my estate every day to a text file using Export-SqlLogin.

What about jobs? Well, we don’t export those yet, but they’re on the list ;) Here’s a video of Restore-DbaDatabase to keep you occupied in the meantime.

SPNs

These used to be a pain, but they aren’t anymore. Now, thanks to Drew Furgiuele, dbatools offers a suite of SPN-related commands that help make Service Principal Name management way easier.

Test-DbaSpn tests for SPNs that should exist and can be piped to Out-GridView and then to Set-DbaSpn. So easy, it makes SPN management fun!

We also have a quick 5 minute video that gives a tour of the four SPN commands.

Migrations

As previously mentioned, migrations can be automated and even scheduled. Check out this video where an entire instance is migrated with a single command.

Finding things

Ever needed to find a stored procedure that contains specific text? When I did development, I had to all the time. dbatools offers an easy, awesome way to do this. You can even search using regular expressssssions! What?!

And it’s smoking fast, too. I once evaluated 37,545 stored procedures on 9 servers in less than seconds!

We’ve even made it easy to find databases, orphaned files, user owned objects, jobs, unused indexes and more. Hell, we even have a command for finding dbatools commands!

In conclusion, automation is life

Intrigued? Check out our whole catalog of commands that automate common (and not so common) SQL Server tasks.

Thanks for joining me for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday.

In a recent version of PowerShell, Publish-Module, which publishes modules to the Gallery began requiring fully qualified Assembly names such as “Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo, Version=$smoversion, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91”.

Previously, it was sufficient just to use short names such as Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo. This had similar behavior to LoadWithPartialName.

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(“Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo”)

Now, however, we must use the fully qualified name and this presents a problem for people who use SMO because we can’t be sure what version of SMO exists on the user’s system unless we’re specifically targeting an SMO version like Microsoft’s official module, SqlServer.

The Problem

When I tried publishing dbatools with just RequiredAssemblies = @(‘Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo’), I received the following error:

Publish-Module fails with “The specified RequiredAssemblies entry ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo’ in the module manifest ‘…\dbatools.psd1’ is invalid. Try again after updating this entry with valid values.

I looked at the official SqlServer module to see how they handled RequiredAssemblies, and as mentioned previously, noticed that they addressed only the 2016 version of SQL Server SMO. I then looked through GitHub for how other people used RequiredAssemblies, both with and without SMO. Nobody else appeared to have a solution that addressed requiring one of an array of possiblities.

The Solution

I ended loading my assemblies in the psm1 file instead of using the ModuleManifest :3

$smoversions = "14.0.0.0", "13.0.0.0", "12.0.0.0", "11.0.0.0", "10.0.0.0", "9.0.242.0", "9.0.0.0"

foreach ($smoversion in $smoversions)
{
    try
    {
        Add-Type -AssemblyName "Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo, Version=$smoversion, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91" -ErrorAction Stop
        $smoadded = $true
    }
    catch
    {
        $smoadded = $false
    }
    
    if ($smoadded -eq $true) { break }
}

if ($smoadded -eq $false) { throw "Can't load SMO assemblies. You must have SQL Server Management Studio installed to proceed." }

$assemblies = "Management.Common", "Dmf", "Instapi", "SqlWmiManagement", "ConnectionInfo", "SmoExtended", "SqlTDiagM", "Management.Utility",
"SString", "Management.RegisteredServers", "Management.Sdk.Sfc", "SqlEnum", "RegSvrEnum", "WmiEnum", "ServiceBrokerEnum", "Management.XEvent",
"ConnectionInfoExtended", "Management.Collector", "Management.CollectorEnum", "Management.Dac", "Management.DacEnum", "Management.IntegrationServices"

foreach ($assembly in $assemblies)
{
    try
    {
        Add-Type -AssemblyName "Microsoft.SqlServer.$assembly, Version=$smoversion, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91" -ErrorAction Stop
    }
    catch
    {
        # Don't care
    }
}

What you can see in the code is that I iterate through all of the versions of SQL Server, including vNext, 2016, 2014 and so on, all the way down to 2005. If none are found, the module throws an informative exception. If SMO does load, the script then attempts to load the other associated assemblies.

Some assemblies such as Management.XEvent don’t exist in lower versions of SMO and will throw an error that I don’t care about – we handle version checks later on in our specific scripts such as Copy-SqlExtendedEvent.

Oh, and don’t worry about this loaded allll of those assemblies. It only takes 11-40 ms on my machine to run the above script.

So feel free to copy the code above to your own modules that use SMO or if you have a better way, let me know. Happy Holidays!

Today’s blog post is part of T-SQL Tuesday. T-SQL Tuesday is the brainchild of Adam Machanic. It is a monthly blog party on the second Tuesday of each month. Everyone is welcome to participate.

intro

dbatools has been around since 2014. At first, it started with one contributor and was solely dedicated to migrating SQL Server instances, but now it’s grown into an awesome open source DBA project with over 30 contributors.

We have nearly 100 commands for you to enjoy and about 10 of them revolve around Backup and Restore. Even more are planned, as you can read in Stuart Moore’s blog post titled Easier SQL Server Restores using DBATools. Stuart is a long-established SQL/PowerShell powerhouse backup/restore and we’re honored to have him on board.

our backup/restore commands (present)

• Get-DbaBackupHistory
• Get-DbaDatabaseSnapshot
• Get-DbaRestoreHistory
• Get-DbaLastBackup
• Read-DbaBackupHeader
• Remove-DbaBackup
• Remove-DbaDatabaseSnapshot
• Restore-SqlBackupFromDirectory*
• Test-DbaLastBackup
• Test-DbaFullRecoveryModel

Want to know more about our snapshot commands? Check out team member Constantine Kokkinos‘ blog post “T-SQL Tuesday 85: Managing database snapshots with dbatools”. A snapshot may not exactly be a backup/restore but its spirit is, fa sho.

Restore-SqlBackupFromDirectory is super useful in a pinch, too, but it’s not quite fleshed out to our standards, so it doesn’t have a corresponding webpage. We expect this will be renamed by the next release.

our backup/restore commands (soon)

• Restore-DbaBackup
• Restore-DbaSnapshot
• New-DbaSnapshot
• Test-DbaBackup
• ???

Coming up, we’re going to have a fully featured Restore-DbaBackup command that can easily restore a single file, to a point in time, from a Ola Hallengren styled directory structure or a formatted hastable (like the one I’ll pass to process my Test-DbaLastBackup command).

We’re eager to keep going. Have any ideas? Let us know by filing an issue or joining our Slack Channel on the SQL Community Slack and telling us what you need.

my favorite backup/restore command

I love this entire toolset but damn, I’ve been needing a command like Test-DbaLastBackup for a long time. Testing backups can be such a pain, but PowerShell can make it easy for your entire estate. Not just one SQL instance where you’ve got some specific stored procedure installed, but all of your SQL servers — from one workstation!

I created Test-DbaLastBackup because I wanted to test all of my backups and using PowerShell was the easiest way to do it. It parses Get-DbaBackupHistory for the last full backup, restores it, runs a DBCC CHECKTABLE and then drops the test database.

Here’s a test I did on my SQL Server 2016 instance. I ran Ola Hallengren’s Full backups for both system and user, then executed Test-DbaLastBackup -SqlServer sql2016. Simple AF!

The command’s webpage is at dbatools.io/Test-DbaLastBackup. Pretty easy, eh? That goes for every command we have, too. Just dbatools.io + /The-CommandName.

Back to the command, Test-DbaLastBackup. It:

• Restores the test databases (named dbatools-testrestore-$dbname by default) to the specified -SqlServer unless you specify a -Destination.
• Then it’ll restore to the Destination (if remote, so long as the backups are on a shared directory — which mine always are).
• You can even specify a MaxMB if you don’t have space for super large database restores (in that case, the -VerifyOnly switch could come in handy).
• Want your Data and Log files to go somewhere other than default? Use the -DataDirectory and -LogDirectory params.

This command is only in its infancy, too! Next up, team member Christian Solje will be adding additional features like Point in Time restore.

get-help

Need to know more about our commands? In every release, we require some basic docs so just run Get-Help Test-DbaLastBackup -Detailed and you’ll be greeted with Examples, docs for each parameter, a synopsis a description and other useful stuff.

download

Intrigued and haven’t installed dbatools yet? Hit up our Downloads page to see how to install it on your system.

youtube and twitter

We have a YouTube channel if you want to watch some videos. That’s the YouTube channel for the SQL Community Collaborative where you can watch videos about open source, (mostly) SQL PowerShell projects like dbareports.io and, of course, dbatools.io.

We are also on Twitter as @psdbatools.

one more thing

If you think we’ve done something that sucks, let us know, either on GitHub or Slack. We welcome and even enjoy alternative approaches and civilized debate about processes. Or hey, if you love something we’ve done, feel free to drop by the Slack channel too.

We like to release early, release often which means that we’re nimble and responsive to changes and requests. (It also means that, while we are at v0.8.69, version 1.0 which is due in Summer 2017 will likely introduce breaking – but beautiful – changes. This is thanks to our Style Sheppard Klaas Vandenberghe.)

in conclusion

We’re a bunch of DBA’s who, like you, want to have an even easier time managing SQL Server. dbatools uses PowerShell to help do exactly that. Want to join the fun? We’re an inclusive group — even if you don’t know PowerShell, we’ll help you. Even if you don’t know Git, we’ve got you covered. Come with your experience, your scholarly background or your enthusiasm and passion. We’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading. I’m looking forward to the next T-SQL Tuesday!