Lately I've been working on scripts to check and set security and configuration settings for SQL Server using PowerShell. One of the settings that I normally set and forget at install time is the Authentication Mode setting. Best practices suggest that you set this to Windows Authentication, but my experience has been that it's always better to ...

The organizers of SQL Saturday #61 in DC (actually Reston, VA) created an Advanced DBA/Dev track for their event, which I think is cool. Both of the presentations I'll be doing there on Saturday are in that track. (In fact, they're the first two sessions of the day.) The first, Automate Policy-Based Management using PowerShell will walk through ...

I am a big fan of the Central Management Server setup that exists in SQL Server 2008, as well as how you can leverage this for the Enterprise Policy Management Framework that Laura Rubbelke (Blog|Twitter) created on Codeplex.  Today one of my DBA’s asked a question about how to leverage the list of servers in the CMS through PowerShell and I ...

When you're trying to set up scripts to deploy policies to your servers (because you ALWAYS automate with PowerShell, right?), it can be sometimes difficult to determine exactly what facets are there, and when you do know the facet name, what properties are available to you. First, in a native PowerShell window you'll need to load the assemblies ...

Maybe I'm a little late to the party, but I thought I would share with you the most recent release of Microsoft's Best Practices Analyzer for SQL Server 2008 R2 (you can also read the original blog announcement from CSS). Let me be clear: this tool is not just for people who are already on SQL Server 2008 R2.  It will also happily analyze ...

PowerShell is an amazing tool to help you automate your administrative processes. There are a lot of books and online sources to help you learn PowerShell, but how do you learn how to use it with SQL Server? Simple, just sign up for my PASS PreCon session. Here's the outline: Use PowerShell to Get the Most out of SQL Server Module 1: ...

SQL Saturday - Nashville, TN, August 21, 2010 I'll be presenting two sessions this Saturday (August 21, 2010) in Nashville, TN - XQuery Basics and Gather SQL Server Performance Data with PowerShell. The event takes place at Nashville State Community College (120 White Bridge Road, Nashville, Tennessee, 37209). In the XQuery session I'll give an ...

Last week I presented a couple of sessions at Tech Ed NA in New Orleans. It was a great experience, even though my demos didn't always work out as planned. Here are the sessions I presented: DAT01-INT Administrative Demo-Fest for SQL Server 2008 SQL Server 2008 provides a wealth of features aimed at the DBA. In this demofest of features we'll ...

The other day I blogged that the version of the SQL Server PowerShell provider (sqlps) follows the version of PowerShell. That’s all goodness, but it has appeared to cause an issue for PowerShell 2.0. the Get-Command PowerShell command-let returns an error (Object reference not set to an instance of an object) if you are using PowerShell 2.0 and ...

I'll be presenting two sessions this Saturday (March 6, 2010) in Charlotte - Automate SQL Server Administration with PowerShell and Gather SQL Server Performance Data with PowerShell. The event takes place at the Microsoft Charlotte Offices on 8050 Microsoft Way, Charlotte, NC 28273. For more information please visit SQLSaturday.com or email us ...