My favorite vacation ever was the time I visited Steve Jones’ wardrobe. It bore a striking resemblance to Maui and even came with complimentary piña coladas.
The year was 2009. The sun was out, Colbie Caillat was on the radio and I hadn’t mastered PowerShell yet, so I was left feeling frantic about the health of my SQL Server estate.
Now, though, I’ve got dbatools which allows me to quickly check the things that concern me most.
Recently, Constantine, Rob, Aaron, and I got together to record a podcast for SQL Data Partners with Steve Stedman and Carlos L Chacon. We talked mostly dbatools, the community, open source projects and then I answered some SQL Family questions.
Today, the SQL Data Partners team released the podcast, along with a corresponding transcript.
Spoiler Alert: I know you’re all wondering what my superhero power would be, so here’s my answer 😊
So, there’s a World Backup Day, but what about World Restore Day? We’ve all been told over and over, backups are useless if they can’t be restored and verified. Grant Fritchey has even yelled it at us a couple times.
Using dbatools to Automate Tests dbatools makes it crazy easy to automate your backup testing, as demonstrated by Sander Stad, Rob Sewell and Anthony Nocentino. It even works on Linux!
In the latest release, we gained 22 new commands and 2 new contributors to the dbatools master repository for a grand total of 48! We even added a couple new Major Contributors to the team. Thanks to all who have joined in to make the awesomest toolset for SQL Server DBAs — we’re now offering the community 180 quality commands!
1.0 Reminder On March 1, 2017, we initiated a new command freeze.
This time it’s not Chrissy, not Drew, not Stuart, not even Shawn…today it’s Claudio writing to you! 😊
With our recent release, “twentyfiveschmeckles (v0.8.694)”, we introduced the command Find-DbaStoredProcedure.
This command allows us to find which stored procedures have a specific string or regular expression. While that may not be groundbreaking, what is new are the features we provide and the speed at which we return them.
Use Cases Let me explain at least two cases where I think this command is (very) useful:
So, we’ve made the first step to 1.0 - we’ve stopped accepting Pull Requests that add new commands. It breaks my heart the most, but every moment that we spend vetting a new command is a moment we can’t spend bug fixing and we really need to focus on standardization and bug fixes.
Our pull request queue is currently filled with new commands that we still need to review, along with a couple bug fixes.
What follows is a walk-through in getting VSCode setup for contributing to dbatools, and also includes various tips for utilizing the PowerShell Extension and Git features.
Install VSCode is a cross-platform tool that works on Windows, Linux and Mac. You can download your specific OS flavor here. Just note that I only use Windows, so if you are on another OS your mileage may vary. If you favor being a beta tester you can download the Insiders Edition from the same page.
In this release, we gained 22 new commands, 7 new contributors to the dbatools master repository for a grand total of 46! We even added a couple new Major Contributors to the team. Thanks to all who have joined in to make the awesomest toolset for SQL Server DBAs — we’re now offering the community 154 quality commands!
Updated Commands We released the follow two commands in snowball but wanted you to download the latest version of dbatools which includes some really awesome improvements to backup and restore.
Just to confuse people, it’s not Chrissy or Drew this time. My name’s Stuart, and I’ve got a new dbatools release to tell you about; snowball.
This Release Is All About Restores DBAs spend a lot of time making sure backups work. Or at least they should, and if they aren’t then putting their spare time to fixing up their CV is probably a good plan.
So we’ve got terabytes of SQL backups stashed away on disk.
These commands were updated Feb 8, 2017 (v0.8.709) to incorporate feedback ❤️
Right, so the first thing you need to know is: I’m not Chrissy. My name’s Drew, and I’m here tell you about an exciting new release of dbatools: schwifty!
In this release we’ve added three new commands to help you manage SPNs for SQL Server Kerberos authentication. If you have a lot of linked servers in your environment, then this is probably a welcome addition to the toolset for you.
In this release, we gained 4 new contributors to the dbatools master repository for a grand total of of 39! We even added 4 new Major Contributors to the team. Thanks to all who have joined in to make the awesomest toolset for SQL Server DBAs — we’re now offering the community 126 quality commands.
Sorry for the Delay, We’ve Been Really Busy! Our last release came out around mid-December. Ideally, we aim for releasing more often, but Rob and I were out presenting about dbatools and dbareports at a few conferences and ran out of time.
First, I’d like to thank everyone for a super amazing year! 🎉 Back at the start of 2016, GitHub reports that there were two contributors to the dbatools repository and now there are 32, excluding bots. THIRTY TWO! Cheers, y’all 🍺 That’s beyond amazing and I don’t even have the words to describe how excited I am to be a part of this incredibly fun and useful project.
With the help of these 32 contributors, the module has grown from 23 commands to 106!
In this release, we gained 4 new contributors to the dbatools master repository for a grand total of of 33! We even added 4 new Major Contributors to the team. Thanks to all who have joined in to make the awesomest toolset for SQL Server DBAs — we’re now offering the community over 100 quality commands
Just a Quick Highlight I’m especially excited about every one of the commands in this release.
Today’s blog post is part of T-SQL Tuesday. T-SQL Tuesday is the brainchild of Adam Machanic. It is a monthly blog party on the second Tuesday of each month. Everyone is welcome to participate.
intro dbatools has been around since 2014. At first, it started with one contributor and was solely dedicated to migrating SQL Server instances, but now it’s grown into an awesome open source DBA project with over 30 contributors.
Recently, I presented to the Philadelphia PowerShell User Group about Contributing to Open Source PowerShell projects using GitHub Desktop. I chose this topic because a number of people have asked for step-by-step instructions on how to work with GitHub.
I love the command line, but with Git? I think it’s important to get the concepts down first and the Desktop version makes that a lot easier to contribute to projects like dbatools, dbareports and even PowerShell itself.
Recently, I presented to the Philadelphia PowerShell User Group about Contributing to Open Source PowerShell projects using GitHub Desktop. I chose this topic because a number of people have asked for step-by-step instructions on how to work with GitHub.
I love the command line, but with Git? I think it’s important to get the concepts down first and the Desktop version makes that a lot easier to contribute to projects like dbatools, dbareports and even PowerShell itself.
In this release (two in one month, woo!), we gained 3 new contributors to the dbatools master repository for a grand total of of 29!
Commands We fixed about 10 bugs, made two commands more efficient and added 5 new commands.
Connect-DbaSqlServer Creates an SMO SQL Server object. Supports both Windows and SQL Authentication. I imagine mostly SMO programmers will like this one, but check it out anyway. It has a ton of useful parameters.
In this month’s release, we gained 6 new contributors to the dbatools master repository for a grand total of of 26! This was likely the result of moving the repository to the new organization on GitHub called the SQL Server Community Collaborative, which makes it easier to participate in the dbatools project.
We also added a few pages to the dbatools GitHub Wiki including: Your First Pull Request, Style Guide and Testing and Q&A.
Hey, Chrissy here. Recently, I had great success with scheduling a database migration and wanted to let you know how I did it in case you have a similar requirement.
My requirement comprised of copying two databases that were 30 GB in size, from one server to another, during a time that I wouldn’t be at the office. Remote work was not possible.
The Script Here’s the scheduled-migration.ps1 script that ultimately worked for me.
dbatools is not only intended to be a great migration tool, but also a toolset to help DBAs follow best practices. Check out all the new commands in this batch, courtesy of Mike Fal, Constantine Kokkinos and Chrissy LeMaire.
Best Practices Commands Ever read a really great article about how to do something properly but then kinda forgot and you have to revisit each time? Well, we’ve codified some of those practices for you, making them easy to both follow and remember.
dbatools