Database engineer with a passion for automation
Active Directory groups are used all over our IT estates. They can be used to simplify managing SQL Server access (Discover SQL Server Permissions hidden via AD Group Membership) as well as for other applications. One of my favourite commands from the ActiveDirectory PowerShell module is Get-AdUser, specifically when used in the following snippet: This…
Log shipping is a SQL Server feature used for disaster-recovery where the transaction log backups are ‘shipped’ from your production instance to a secondary instance. This enables you to cutover to this secondary server in the event of a disaster where you lose your primary instance. Log shipping is not a new feature but is…
One of the benefits available to us when using SQL Server Availability Groups is that we can offload read activity to a secondary replica. This can be useful if we need to run reports against our OLTP databases. Instead of this taking up valuable resources on the primary instance we can make use of the…
Well folks, it’s Wednesday here in the UK, which means I’m a day late to get my blog post in for T-SQL Tuesday. However, if I was in Hawaii it would be still Tuesday so let’s go for it… I used a handy short script this morning and I figured it was worth a quick,…
Well folks, after starting the year off on a strong foot it’s been a while since I’ve published any blog posts. Hope you didn’t miss me too much, but I’m back now and I’ve got a useful dbatools snippet for you today. Last week at the day job I had a situation where I needed…
Last week, in Part 1, we talked about how to easily keep track of our resources with tags. There are many strategies for tagging your resources but I specifically focused on adding a ‘dateCreated’ tag so we could see when resources were created – since this isn’t available by default. During that post we identified…
I’ve been working on some Azure exams recently, and I personally learn best by fiddling with things. The Microsoft learn content is excellent, and I’d highly recommend that for any of the Azure exams I’ve taken so far. However, I also like to build things myself and experiment a little with all the available options.…
Another week and another useful dbatools snippet for you today. Last week at work I was given a folder of 1,500 scripts – each containing a create table statement. Can you imagine having to open each file in Management Studio to be able to execute it? Thank goodness we have PowerShell and dbatools on our…
I was working in my lab environment this weekend, playing with some SQL Servers that I had built with PowerShell DSC a while ago. I had installed SQL Server with mostly defaults, including not changing the engine and agent service accounts. For the blog post I thought I was going to write next, I wanted…
I was listening to a podcast last week about PowerShell, when one of the hosts mentioned having to ‘up arrow’ back through your history to find a command you wanted to rerun. This made me realise that I should write this quick post on using PSReadLine’s interactive search function. This tip is a serious time…