Database engineer with a passion for automation
As a SQL Server DBA, aggregating data is first nature. I can easily throw together some T-SQL if I need to get the average sales per product group, or perhaps the number of employees hired per month. Yesterday I was writing a little PowerShell when I came across a problem. I needed to get the…
One of the biggest obstacles people face when using DSC is the troubleshooting and reporting pieces. There are options here to integrate with third party tools to create a more polished enterprise solution, but if you’re going with just straight DSC you might feel it is lacking some in this area. We do however have…
There have been a lot of blog posts and talk around upgrading your servers in the past. However, the chatter always seems to intensify when we start getting close to that dreaded ‘end of support’ date for your older Windows and SQL Server versions. I hope this isn’t the first place you are discovering this,…
One of the reasons I love PowerShell is the comment based help. This allows you to easily get documentation for functions directly within your PowerShell session. By using Get-Help for a function you can retrieve a description, information on the parameters, and examples of how to use the function. Recently I was adding help to…
Learn more about the building blocks for our #Powershell #DSC configurations.
Once we have crafted the perfect configuration and shipped it out to our target nodes, it’s time for the magic to happen. The MOF file that we created by executing our configuration is translated and enacted by the Local Configuration Manager (LCM) on each target node. The LCM is the engine of DSC and plays…
In my last Desired State Configuration (DSC) post a couple of weeks ago I covered some of the concepts involved with DSC, and I also have a T-SQL Tuesday post to get you started writing your first configuration. So today we are going to look at the next step in the process: what happens after…
I’m currently working on a pretty interesting project to explore using PowerShell’s Desired State Configuration (DSC) to manage SQL Servers. DSC uses declarative language to define the desired state of your infrastructure. Ensuring that the directory C:\Test exists is a simple example. A more complicated example would be the complete configuration of a SQL Server.…
This weekend, while I was having a great time at SQL Saturday Cleveland, I ran into my friend Bert (b|t). He had some dbatools questions, which I was happy to help him with. Now that dbatools has over 500 commands, it is both awesome and terrifying. Bert wanted to know how to automate his database…
Automation is something that interests me greatly, and I think if you have read even one of my previous posts you’ll know that my favorite tool for this kind of work is PowerShell. This is the perfect topic to kick off T-SQL Tuesday for 2019 so thanks goes to Garry Bargsley for hosting this month.…