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 ...

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 ...

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: ...

A year ago in anticipation of publishing a book on SMO (which never came to be) I wrote a number of chapters demonstrating how to manage specific sets of objects, and I provided examples in VB.Net, C# and PowerShell. As should be expected, I thoroughly tested all of the code samples to make sure they worked. This year I've been part a couple of ...

Microsoft included PowerShell with SQL Server 2008, and the new sqlps.exe program which includes the SQL PowerShell drivers including the PS Drives and new cmdlets for SQL Server. I prefer to work from vanilla PowerShell and load the assemblies I need, so I have code at the start of my script to load the appropriate assemblies. When I started ...

Errors occur. (I'm sure that's someone's corollary to Stuff Happens.) Errors occur, and that's why we write error handling code in our applications. My least favorite time for the occurrance of errors is when I'm doing demos, and that's what happened in a presentation I did at PASS last week. I try to test everything before giving the demos, ...

While preparing for a presentation at PASS next month I tested my PowerShell script to back up user databases on a server. This script has been running flawlessly against SQL Server 2005 for a couple of years, so I was really surprised when PowerShell returned a screen full of errors and no backups. What slipped my mind was something I'd ...

Wow, it's been a crazy month! Two weeks of Tech Ed in Orlando, where I spent time helping people with questions on SQL Server in the Database Platform area and presented two sessions on SMO and PowerShell (one with my friend Peter Ward from Australia). Then, my last week as a DBA at Advanstar, followed by my first week as a Trainer for ...

In the February CTP of SQL Server 2008 a new feature has appeared in SQL Server Management Studio. You now have the ability to right-click on an object in the Object Explorer window and open up a PowerShell window. In this window you can navigate the database structures much like you can a disk file subsystem, or like you can navigate the ...

In browsing through the SQL Server 2008 SMO Object Library I noticed there are a couple of additional DLL's. For example, the SQL Server WMI Management objects, formerly in Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo.dll, are now in Microsoft.SqlServer.SqlWmiManagement.dll. There's also a new one called Microsoft.SqlServer.SmoExtended.dll. I took a look in there ...