Database engineer with a passion for automation
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…
When granting permissions to SQL Server resources we have a few options. One option is to grant permissions to Active Directory groups instead of individual users. This has several benefits, for example, improved security over using SQL logins, and the ability to create a separation of duties when controlling database access. However, it does add…
Have you ever wanted to quickly backup/restore a database to the same instance to do some side by side testing? Perhaps to make some index changes or code changes, without actually changing the live copy of the database? Ideally you’d already have another environment for this sort of work, but even then sometimes it’s handy…
This was the 3rd year I participated in the Advent of Code (AoC). If you haven’t heard of AoC, it’s an advent calendar of coding puzzles. Each day between December 1st and 25th a two part puzzle is released, you can use whatever language you want to solve it, with the goal being just to…
Last week I gave a presentation at Data South West on dbachecks and dbatools. One of the questions I got was whether you could run dbachecks against Azure SQL Databases, to which I had no idea. I always try to be prepared for potential questions that might come up, but I had only been thinking…
In an ideal situation it probably shouldn’t matter which node of a failover cluster your resources and roles are hosted on, but the real world is often far from ideal. This post will talk through how we can record the current owner nodes and then use Pester to ensure we’re in the ideal configuration. This…