Tag Archives: sqlserver

SQL Server Availability Group FailoverDetection Utility PowerShell Function Improvements – Named Instances, Archiving Data, Speed

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In my last post I wrote about a new function for gathering the data and running the FailoverDetection utility by the Tiger Team to analyse availability group failovers. I have updated it following some comments and using it for a day.

Don’t forget the named instances Rob!

Michael Karpenko wrote a comment pointing out that I had not supported named instances, which was correct as it had not been written for that. Thank you Michael 🙂 I have updated the code to deal with named instances.

Confusing results

I also realised as we started testing the code that if you had run the code once and then ran it again against a different availability group the tool does not clear out the data folder that it uses so you can get confusing results.

In the image below I had looked at the default instance and then a MIRROR named instance. As you can see the results json on the left shows the default instance SQLClusterAG while the one on the right shows both the SQLClusterAG and the MirrrAG instance results.

duplicate results.png

This is not so useful if you don’t notice this at first with the expanded json!! Now you may in this situation want to see the combined results from all of the availability groups on one cluster. You could gather all of the data from each instance and then add it to the data folder easily enough.

By cleaning out the data folder before running the utility the results are as expected.

duplicate results fixed.png

Archive the data for historical analysis

One of the production DBAs pointed out that having gathered the information, it would be useful to hold it for better analysis of repeated issues. I have added an archiving step so that when the tools runs, if there is already data in the data gathering folder, it will copy that to an archive folder and name it with the date and time that the cluster log was created as this is a good estimation of when the analysis was performed. If an archive folder location is not provided it will create an archive folder in the data folder. This is not an ideal solution though, as the utility will copy all of the files and folders from there to its own location so it is better to define an archive folder in the parameters.

Get-Eventlog is sloooooooooooow

I was running the tools and noticed it sat running the system event log task for a long long time. I ran some tests using a variation of the dbatools prompt.

This will show in the prompt how long it took to run the previous statement .

speed.png

In the image above (which you can click to get a larger version as with all images on this blog) you can see that it took 18ms to set the date variable, FOUR MINUTES and FORTY THREE seconds to get the system log in the last 2 days using Get-EventLog and 29.1 seconds using Get-WinEvent and a FilterHashtable.

Getting the function

This function requires PowerShell version 5 and the dbatools module.

You can get the function from my GitHub Functions Repository here (at the moment – will be adding to dbatools see below)

Load the function by either running the code or if you have it saved as a file dot-sourcing it.

. .\Invoke-SqlFailOverDetection.ps1

There are two .’s with a space in between and then a \ without a space. so Dot Space Dot Whack path to file.

The next thing you should do is what you should always do with a new PowerShell function, look at the help.

Get-Help Invoke-SqlFailOverDetection -Detailed

You will find plenty of examples to get you going and explanations of all of the parameters and more info on my previous post.

Happy Automating!

Getting the SQL Version from a backup using dbatools ………. on PowerShell Core

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Following an upgrade to SQL Server the backup share had a number of backups, some from the old version and some from the newer version. I was asked if I had a script to be able to get the SQL Version from the backup file from all of the files in the backup share.

With dbatools this was easy to accomplish with Read-DbaBackuoHeader

$backupshare = "$share\keep"
$Instance = "SQL0\Mirror"

$information = foreach ($BackupFile in (Get-ChildItem $backupshare)) {
    $FileName = @{Name = 'FileName'; Expression = {$BackupFile.Name}}
    Read-DbaBackupHeader -SqlInstance $Instance -Path $BackupFile.FullName | Select-Object  $FileName, DatabaseName , CompatibilityLevel, SqlVersion
}
$information | Format-Table

read-dbabackupheader.PNG

You can get more information about the backup using Read-DbaBackupHeader and as it is PowerShell it is easy to put this information into any format that you wish, maybe into a database with Write-DbaDataTable

Support for PowerShell Core in dbatools is coming along very nicely. Following some hard work by the dbatools team and some PowerShell Community members like Mathias Jessen it is now possible to run a large number of dbatools commands in PowerShell Core running on Windows. There is still a little bit of work to do to get it working on Linux and Mac but I hear the team are working hard on that.

So the code example you see above was running on Windows 10 using PowerShell 6.1.1 the current latest stable release. This is excellent news and congratulations to all those working hard to make this work

dbatoolscore.PNG

If you want to try PowerShell Core, you can follow the instructions

Happy Automating!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A PowerShell Pester Check for parsing SQL scripts

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I like to write Pester checks to make sure that all is as expected! This is just a quick post as much to help me remember this script 🙂

This is a quick Pester test I wrote to ensure that some SQL Scripts in a directory would parse so there was some guarantee that they were valid T-SQL. It uses the SQLParser.dll and because it was using a build server without SQL Server I have to load the required DLLs from the dbatools module (Thank you dbatools 🙂 )

It simply runs through all of the .sql files and runs the parser against them and checks the errors. In the case of failures it will output where it failed in the error message in the failed Pester result as well.

You will need dbatools module installed on the instance and at least version 4 of the Pester module as well

Describe "Testing SQL" {
    Context "Running Parser" {
        ## Load assembly
        $Parserdll = (Get-ChildItem 'C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\dbatools' -Include Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.dll -Recurse)[0].FullName
        [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFile($Parserdll) | Out-Null
        $TraceDll = (Get-ChildItem 'C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\dbatools' -Include Microsoft.SqlServer.Diagnostics.Strace.dll -Recurse)[0].FullName
        [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFile($TraceDll) | Out-Null
        $ParseOptions = New-Object Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.Parser.ParseOptions
        $ParseOptions.BatchSeparator = 'GO'
        $files = Get-ChildItem -Path $Env:Directory -Include *.sql -Recurse ## This variable is set as a Build Process Variable or put your path here
        $files.ForEach{
            It "$($Psitem.FullName) Should Parse SQL correctly" {
                $filename = $Psitem.FullName
                $sql = Get-Content -LiteralPath "$fileName"
                $Script = [Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.Parser.Parser]::Parse($SQL, $ParseOptions)
                $Script.Errors | Should -BeNullOrEmpty
            }
        }
    }
}

Handling Missing Instances when Looping with Pester

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In my previous posts about writing your first Pester Test and looping through instances I described how you can start to validate that your SQL Server is how YOU want it to be.

Unavailable machines

Once you begin to have a number of tests for a number of instances you want to be able to handle any machines that are not available cleanly otherwise you might end up with something like this.

01 - error.png

In this (made up) example we loop through 3 instances and try to check the DNS Server entry is correct but for one of them we get a massive error and if we had created a large number of tests for each machine we would have a large number of massive errors.

Empty Collection

If we don’t successfully create our collection we might have an empty collection which will give us a different issue. No tests

02 - no tests.png

If this was in amongst a whole number of tests we would not have tested anything in this Describe block and might be thinking that our tests were OK because we had no failures of our tests. We would be wrong!

Dealing with Empty Collections

One way of dealing with empty collections is to test that they have more than 0 members

if ($instances.count -gt 0) {
    $instances.ForEach{
        ## Tests in here
    }
}
else {Write-Warning "Uh-Oh - The Beard is Sad! - The collection is empty. Did you set `$Instances correctly?"}
Notice the backtick ` before the $ to escape it in the Write-Warning. An empty collection now looks like
03 - uh-oh.png
Which is much better and provides useful information to the user

Dealing with Unavailable Machines

If we want to make sure we dont clutter up our test results with a whole load of failures when a machine is unavailable we can use similar logic.

First we could check if it is responding to a ping (assuming that ICMP is allowed by the firewall and switches) using

Test-Connection -ComputerName $computer -Count 1 -Quiet -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

This will just try one ping and do it quietly only returning True or False and if there are any errors it shouldn’t mention it

In the example above I am using PSRemoting and we should make sure that that is working too. So whilst I could use

Test-WSMan -ComputerName $computer

this only checks if a WSMAN connection is possible and not other factors that could be affecting the ability to run remote sessions. Having been caught by this before I have always used this function from Lee Holmes (Thank you Lee) and thus can use

$instances.ForEach{
    $computer = $_.Split('\')[0]# To get the computername if there is an instance name
    # Check if machine responds to ping
    if (!(Test-Connection-ComputerName $computer-Count 1-Quiet -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue))
    {Write-Warning "Uh-Oh - $Computer is not responding to a ping - aborting the tests for this machine"; Return}
    # Check if PSremoting is possible for this machine
    # Requires Test-PSRemoting by Lee Holmes http://www.leeholmes.com/blog/2009/11/20/testing-for-powershell-remoting-test-psremoting/
    if (!(Test-PsRemoting$computer))
    {Write-Warning "Uh-Oh - $Computer is not able to use PSRemoting - aborting the tests for this machine"; Return}
    Describe "Testing Instance $($_)" {
        ## Put tests in here
    }
which provides a result like this

04 - better handling.png

Which is much better I think 🙂

Let dbatools do the error handling for you

If your tests are only using the dbatools module then there is built in error handling that you can use. By default dbatools returns useful messages rather than the exceptions from PowerShell (You can enable the exceptions using the -EnableExceptions parameter if you want/need to) so if we run our example from the previous post it will look like

05 - dbatools handling.png

which is fine for a single command but we don’t really want to waste time and resources repeatedly trying to connect to an instance if we know it is not available if we are running multiple commands against each instance.

dbatools at the beginning of the loop

We can use Test-DbaConnection to perform a check at the beginning of the loop as we discussed in the previous post

$instances.ForEach{
    if (!((Test-DbaConnection-SqlInstance $_ -WarningAction SilentlyContinue).ConnectSuccess))
    {Write-Warning "Uh-Oh - we cannot connect to $_ - aborting the tests for this instance"; Return}
Notice that we have used -WarningAction SilentlyContinue to hide the warnings from the command this tiime. Our test now looks like
06 - dbatools test-dbaconnection.png
Test-DbaConnection performs a number of tests so you can check for ping SQL version, domain name and remoting if you want to exclude tests on those basis

Round Up

In this post we have covered some methods of ensuring that your Pester Tests return what you expect. You don’t want empty collections of SQL Instances making you think you have no failed tests when you have not actually run any tests.

You can do this by checking how many instances are in the collection

You also dont want to keep running tests against a machine or instance that is not responding or available.

You can do this by checking a ping with Test-Connection or if remoting is required by using the Test-PSRemoting function from Lee Holmes

If you want to use dbatools exclusively you can use Test-DbaConnection

Here is a framework to put your tests inside. You will need to provide the values for the $Instances and place your tests inside the Describe Block

if ($instances.count -gt 0) {
    $instances.ForEach{
        $TestConnection = Test-DbaConnection-SqlInstance $_ -WarningAction SilentlyContinue
        # Check if machine responds to ping
        if (!($TestConnection.IsPingable))
        {Write-Warning "Uh-Oh - The Beard is Sad! - - $_ is not responding to a ping - aborting the tests for this instance"; Return}
        # Check if we have remote access to the machine
        if (!($TestConnection.PsRemotingAccessible))
        {Write-Warning "Uh-Oh - The Beard is Sad! - - $_ is not able to use PSRemoting - aborting the tests for this instance"; Return}
        # Check if we have SQL connection to the Instance
        if (!($TestConnection.ConnectSuccess))
        {Write-Warning "Uh-Oh - The Beard is Sad! - - we cannot connect to SQL on $_ - aborting the tests for this instance"; Return}
        Describe "Testing Instance $($_)" {
            ## Now put your tests in here - seperate them with context blocks if you want to
            Context "Networks" { }
        }
    }
}
else
## If the collection is empty
{Write-Warning "Uh-Oh - The Beard is Sad! - The collection is empty. Did you set `$Instances correctly?"}

2 Ways to Loop through collections in Pester

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In my last post I showed you how to write your first Pester test to validate something. Here’s a recap

  • Decide the information you wish to test
  • Understand how to get it with PowerShell
  • Understand what makes it pass and what makes it fail
  • Write a Pester Test

You probably have more than one instance that you want to test, so how do you loop through a collection of instances? There are a couple of ways.

Getting the Latest Version of the Module

The magnificent Steve Jones wrote about getting the latest version of Pester and the correct way to do it. You can find the important information here

Test Cases

The first way is to use the Test Case parameter of the It command (the test) which I have written about when using TDD for Pester here

Lets write a test first to check if we can successfully connect to a SQL Instance. Running

Find-DbaCommand connection

shows us that the Test-DbaConnection command is the one that we want from the dbatools module. We should always run Get-Help to understand how to use any PowerShell command. This shows us that the results will look like this

01 - gethelp test-dbaconnection

So there is a ConnectSuccess result which returns True or false. Our test can look like this for a single instance

Describe 'Testing connection to ROB-XPS' {
    It "Connects successfully to ROB-XPS" {
        (Test-DbaConnection-SqlInstance ROB-XPS).ConnectSuccess | Should Be $True
    }
}

which gives us some test results that look like this

successful test.png
which is fine for one instance but we want to check many.
We need to gather the instances into a $Instances variable. In my examples I have hard coded a list of SQL Instances but you can, and probably should, use a more dynamic method, maybe the results of a query to a configuration database. Then we can fill our TestCases variable which can be done like this
$Instances = 'ROB-XPS','ROB-XPS\DAVE','ROB-XPS\BOLTON','ROB-XPS\SQL2016'
# Create an empty array
$TestCases = @()
# Fill the Testcases with the values and a Name of Instance
$Instances.ForEach{$TestCases += @{Instance = $_}}
Then we can write our test like this
# Get a list of SQL Servers
# Use whichever method suits your situation
# Maybe from a configuration database
# I'm just using a hard-coded list for example
$Instances = 'ROB-XPS','ROB-XPS\DAVE','ROB-XPS\BOLTON','ROB-XPS\SQL2016'

# Create an empty array
$TestCases = @()

# Fill the Testcases with the values and a Name of Instance
$Instances.ForEach{$TestCases += @{Instance = $_}}
Describe 'Testing connection to SQL Instances' {
    # Put the TestCases 'Name' in <> and add the TestCases parameter
    It "Connects successfully to <Instance>" -TestCases $TestCases {
        # Add a Parameter to the test with the same name as the TestCases Name
        Param($Instance)
        # Write the test using the TestCases Name
        (Test-DbaConnection -SqlInstance $Instance).ConnectSuccess | Should Be $True
    }
}
Within the title of the test we refer to the instance inside <> and add the parameter TestCases with a value of the $TestCases variable. We also need to add a Param() to the test with the same name and then use that variable in the test.
This looks like this
Testcases test.png

Pester is PowerShell

The problem with  Test Cases is that we can only easily loop through one collection, but as Pester is just PowerShell we can simply use ForEach if we wanted to loop through multiple ones, like instances and then databases.

I like to use the ForEach method as it is slightly quicker than other methods. It will only work with PowerShell version 4 and above. Below that version you need to pipe the collection to For-EachObject.

Lets write a test to see if our databases have trustworthy set on. We can do this using the Trustworthy property returned from Get-DbaDatabase. 

We loop through our Instances using the ForEach method and create a Context for each Instance to make the test results easier to read. We then place the call to Get-DbaDatabase inside braces and loop through those and check the Trustworthy property

# Get a list of SQL Servers
# Use whichever method suits your situation
# Maybe from a configuration database
# I'm just using a hard-coded list for example
$Instances = 'ROB-XPS','ROB-XPS\DAVE','ROB-XPS\BOLTON','ROB-XPS\SQL2016'
Describe 'Testing user databases' {
    # Loop through the instances
    $Instances.ForEach{
        # Create a Context for each Instance.
        Context "Testing User Databases on $($_)" {
            # Loop through the User databases on the instance
            (Get-DbaDatabase -SqlInstance $_ -ExcludeAllSystemDb).ForEach{
                # Refer to the database name and Instance name inside a $()
                It "Database $($_.Name) on Instance $($_.Parent.Name) should not have TRUSTWORTHY ON" {
                    $_.Trustworthy | Should Be $false
                }
            }
        }
    }
}
and it looks like this

testdatabasetrustworthy.png

So there you have two different ways to loop through collections in your Pester tests. Hopefully this can help you to write some good tests to validate your environment.
Happy Pestering

Spend a Whole Day With Chrissy & I at SQLBits

If you would like to spend a whole day with Chrissy LeMaire and I at SQLBits in London in February – we have a pre-con on the Thursday
You can find out more about the pre-con sqlps.io/bitsprecon
and you can register at sqlps.io/bitsreg

Write Your first Pester Test Today

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I was in Glasgow this Friday enjoying the fantastic hospitality of the Glasgow SQL User Group @SQLGlasgow and presenting sessions with Andre Kamman, William Durkin and Chrissy LeMaire

I presented “Green is Good Red is Bad – Turning your checklists into Pester Tests”. I had to make sure I had enough energy beforehand so I treated myself to a fabulous burger.

20171110_114933-compressor.jpg

Afterwards I was talking to some of the attendees and realised that maybe I could show how easy it was to start writing your first Pester test. Here are the steps to follow so that you can  write your first Pester test

Decide the information you wish to test
Understand how to get it with PowerShell
Understand what makes it pass and what makes it fail
Write a Pester Test

The first bit is up to you. I cannot decide what you need to test for on your servers in your environments. Whatever is the most important. For now pick one thing.

Logins – Lets pick logins as an example for this post. It is good practice to disable the sa account is advice that you will read all over the internet and is often written into estate documentation so lets write a test for that

Now we need the PowerShell command to return the information to test for. We need a command that will get information about logins on a SQL server and if it can return disabled logins then all the better.

As always when starting to use PowerShell with SQL Server I would start with dbatools if we run Find-DbaCommand we can search for commands in the module that support logins. (If you have chosen something none SQL Server related then you can use Get-Command or the internet to find the command you need)

find-dbacommand.png

Get-DbaLogin . That looks like the one that we want. Now we need to understand how to use it. Always always use Get-Help to do this. If we run

Get-Help Get-DbaLogins -detailed

we get all of the information about the command and the examples. Example 8 looks like it will help us

get-dbalogin example

So now try running the command for our disabled sa account

Get-DbaLogin -SqlInstance rob-xps -Login sa -Disabled

disabled sa account

So we know that if we have a disabled sa account we get a result. Lets enable the sa account and run the command again

not disabled.png

We don’t get a result. Excellent, now we know what happens for a successful test – we get one result and for failed test we get zero results. We can check that by running

login count

The first one has the account disabled and the second one not. So now we can write our Pester Test. We can start with a Describe Block with a useful title. I am going to add a context block so that you can see how you can group your tests.

describe context

and then we will write our test. Pester Tests use the It keyword. You should always give a useful title to your test

it should

Now we can write our test. We know that the command returns one result when we want it to pass so we can write a test like this

login test.png

The code I have added is

(Get-DbaLogin -SqlInstance rob-xps -Login sa -Disabled).Count | Should Be 1
which is
  • the code for getting the information about the thing we wanted to test (The count of the disabled sa logins on the instance)
  • a pipe symbol |
  • The Should key word
  • The Be keyword
  • and the result we want to pass the test (1)

Ta Da! One Pester test written. You can run the test just by highlighting the code and running it in VS Code (or PowerShell ISE) and it will look like this for a passing test

passing test

It is better to save it for later use and then call it with Invoke-Pester

invoke

So now you can write your first Pester test. Just find the PowerShell to get the information that you need, understand what the results will be for passing and failing tests and write your test 🙂

Getting the Latest Version of the Module

The magnificent Steve Jones wrote about getting the latest version of Pester and the correct way to do it. You can find the important information here

Spend a Whole Day With Chrissy & I at SQLBits

If you would like to spend a whole day with Chrissy LeMaire and I at SQLBits in London in February – we have a pre-con on the Thursday
You can find out more about the pre-con sqlps.io/bitsprecon
and you can register at sqlps.io/bitsreg

TSQL2sDay – Get-PostRoundup

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First an apology, this round up is late!

The reason for that is an error in the PowerShell testing module Pester (That’s not completely true as you shall see!!)

I spoke in Stuttgart at the PowerShell Saturday last weekend and had intended to write this blog post whilst travelling, unfortunately I found a major error in Pester (again not strictly true but it makes a good story!!)

I explained it with this slide in my presentation

Yep, I forgot to pack my NUC with my VMs on it and had to re-write all my demos!!

But anyway, on to the TSQL2sDay posts

What a response. You wonderful people. I salute you with a Rimmer salute

There are 34 TSQL2sDay posts about dbatools, about starting with PowerShell, If you should learn PowerShell, SSAS, SSRS, Log Shipping, backups, restores, Pester, Default settings, best practices, migrations, Warnings in Agent Jobs, sqlpackage, VLFs, CMS, Disabling Named Pipes, Orphaned users, AG Status, AG Agent Jobs, logging, classes, auditing, copying files, ETL and more.

I am really pleased to see so many first timers to the TSQL2sDay blog monthly blog party. Please don’t let this be your only TSQL2sDay post. Come back next month and write a post on that topic.

Here they are below in the media of tweets, so that you can also go and follow these wonderful people who are so willing to share their knowledge. Say thank you to them, ask them questions, interact.

Learn, Share, Network

Volker wrote about testing best practices with dbatools

Dave explains why PowerShell is so useful to him in his ETL processes

Steve writes about the time he has saved using PowerShell to automate restores and audit SQL Server instances

https://twitter.com/Steve_TSQL/status/907713842943115264

Nate talks about copying large files like SQL Server backups using BITS with PowerShell

Warren talks about his experience as a beginner, the amount of things he automates and his DBReboot module

THANK YOU every single one and apologies if I have missed anyone!

 

 

#TSQL2sDay – Starting Out with PowerShell

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tsql2sdayThis months TSQL2sday is hosted by me!

Surprise! – I chose PowerShell

I am really looking forward to seeing what other people post. Some advanced scripts that will help you and show you how you can use PowerShell to save you time and hopefully some beginner posts explaining experiences or showing you how to start with PowerShell and SQL Server. I decided to go with the latter.

First though a warning.

PowerShell is another language, you are not going to be as proficient in a new language as you are in the language you spend all day working with. You will have to go through the learning curve and you will have to understand how to interpret errors. There is a learning curve just like with any language. Undoubtedly you will get frustrated at times. Reach out for help. Use twitter, use the #powershellhelp in the SQL Server Community Slack channel. There are many other places and plenty of people who will be glad to help you.

Open the Editor

If you are using a Windows machine you will have PowerShell installed. You will find it in your start menu on Windows 7 under All Programs, Accessories, Windows PowerShell folder, and then click Windows PowerShell or Windows PowerShell ISE. On Windows 8 or 10 search for PowerShell.

PowerShell or PowerShell ISE? Use PowerShell instead of cmd.exe for command line usage and ISE for developing scripts, functions and modules. (However, read on before making your choice)

PowerShell on Other O/S’s (and Windows!)

Just as SQL Server is available on Linux PowerShell is also available cross-platform, you can run and edit PowerShell on Linux and on Mac natively. The best editor to use is VS Code which is also available cross-platform. In fact, as Microsofts David Wilson says in this blog post

The PowerShell ISE has been the official editor for PowerShell throughout most of the history of Windows PowerShell. Now with the advent of the cross-platform PowerShell Core, we need a new official editor that’s available across all supported OS platforms and versions. Visual Studio Code is now that editor and the majority of our effort will be focused there.

So my advice is, whichever operating system you are using, use VS Code to write, edit, debug and run your PowerShell as that is the editor where Microsoft are spending the majority of their effort in development. Follow the instructions here to install You can also use it with many other languages including T-SQL. I find it a very useful tool

Where to start?

Well that depends what you want to do. Start by reading. Start by trying to accomplish something in PowerShell even if you know how to do it another way. This will also help you to realise when you are trying to use a hammer to put in a screw (using the wrong tool for the job)

What Command?

You don’t know where to start so how do you know the command to use? Here is a first command. You will use it often. I use it everyday still despite using PowerShell daily for many years. But don’t run it yet!

Get-Command

PowerShell is quite intuitive in it’s command naming. It uses a Verb-Noun syntax. You know without me explaining what this command will do. It will “Get” the “Command” (s). PowerShell uses singular nouns for its commands. I have 8000+ commands on my machine so it would have overloaded you with commands if you had run it without filters!

We use * as a wildcard in PowerShell so we can use that with our Get-Command command to find some commands to run. Type Get-Com and then hit the tab button. This will not only help you as it will auto-complete, it will reduce the number of errors as it will only auto-complete correct command names :-).

Get-Command *service

This will show all commands which end with service. The results will have some different headings. The screenshot below shows just one command to reduce confusion.

03 - get-service.png

The type of command, the name of the command, the version of the command and the module it is in. PowerShell uses modules to group commands together and to enable you to install the ones that you require from a repository like the PowerShell Gallery (more on this later).

You can find all of the commands in a module with the Get-Command command like this

Get-Command -Module microsoft.powershell.management

This will show you all of the commands in the management module which may be a good place to start exploring. In this module for example

  • Test-Connection is like ping but better
  • Test-Path tests the existence of files and file paths
  • *-Service works with services
  • *-Process works with processes
  • *-Computer for power options for a computer
  • Get-ComputerInfo which will give you computer information (surprisingly 🙂 )

This is also something to remember in the future when you want to know what commands a module has or what the precise name of the command is.

Maybe once you install the dbatools module, the sqlserver module or the SSRS module??

HOMEWORK – Examine the names of commands in other modules that you find in

Get-Module

or for more choices

Get-Module -ListAvailable

How do I use that command though?

You need to read! PowerShell comes with a lot of documentation, a lot of it is available on your machine. Lets introduce another command

Get-Help

As you can imagine, this gets the help for a command or returns help topics about PowerShell. Again, I use this every single day and you should too. Lets start with the first one. Lets get help for the Get-ChildItem command

Get-Help Get-ChildItem

Now, some of you may not get very much returned and a message at the bottom which says

Get-Help cannot find the Help files for this cmdlet on this computer. It is displaying only partial help.
— To download and install Help files for the module that includes this cmdlet, use Update-Help.
— To view the Help topic for this cmdlet online, type: “Get-Help Get-ChildItem -Online” or
go to https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=113308.

When you have something else to do I would recommend running Update-Help as it suggests (It can take a few minutes to run) but for now make use of the -Online switch.

HOMEWORK – Run Update-Help

Get-Help Get-ChildItem -Online

This is available for all of the Microsoft modules and some of the better open source modules, dbatools is an example of a (brilliant) community module which has -Online URLs for it’s commands. Running Get-Help (with or without the -Online switch) will give you plenty of information about the command, the switches available, the inputs and outputs.

Maybe start by using the -examples switch

Get-Help Get-ChildItem -Examples

will show you some examples of how to use the command

05 gethelp examples

Now you can start to explore the file system with this command (also the SQL Server, Registry, Certificate Store and many more things)

I also like to use the ShowWindow switch

Get-Help Get-ChildItem -ShowWindow

which will open up the help in a separate window which can be useful when you are writing a script and it is searchable

04 - gethelp showwindo

But Chrissy prefers to use the -Detailed switch

Get-Help Get-ChildItem -Detailed

You can decide which way you like best.

Now you know how to find a command and hot to find out how to use it. If you are using VS Code (or ISE) you have access to Intellisense and snippets to help you with the syntax. You can run a command and get some results.

HOMEWORK – Use Get-Help to understand how to use commands. ( Extra merit marks for teachers pets who read the topics they find using Get-Help About_*) Also, instant demerit points throughout the course (your career) for students who do not use Get-Help when using any command for the first time.

Hopefully you are confident enough to have run some commands. If you are worried about breaking things only run the commands which start with Get- as these should only be returning information or objects and not changing anything.

This isn’t cmd 

This isn’t cmd. What you are getting back is not text.

It is an object.

Unless you choose to use one of the formatting commands or the command you are using outputs using a formatting command (pro-tip don’t do that) then what you will receive as the results of your command is an object.

This means that there is more that you can do with the results than just have them in text format. You want Text File,JSON, XML, CSV, Excel output or to write to a database? Look here for ideas

Objects,Objects,Objects

Objects are awesome. Lets start with a SQL Server Instance object to show you how to explore objects. You will need to install the most useful PowerShell module you will find if you are working with SQL Server – dbatools

Disclosure – I am a contributor to the open source module dbatools. I am presenting a full day workshop in Singapore for the PowerShell Conference Asia in October. I am also proctoring at Chrissy and CK’s PASS Summit in Seattle. I highly recommend that you come and join us at one of those events if you can to further learn how you can use PowerShell to administer SQL Server

You can install it from the PowerShell Gallery using

Install-Module dbatools -Scope CurrentUser

You will be asked if you want to trust the repository, say Yes. If this doesn’t work on your machine (you are on an older version of PowerShell) follow the instructions on this page.  Or ask for help in #powershellhelp in Slack

Now that the module is installed we can create a SQL Server Instance object by assigning the results of a command to a variable.

A variable in PowerShell is designated by a $.

I suggest that you get used to following this step as well. This is a great way of exploring the results of any command and understanding what you can do with it.

We will use the Get-Member command. Another one that I use every single day.

Warning – You do not have to use these methods to accomplish tasks in PowerShell against SQL Server as both Microsoft and the community have released modules which will enable you to general tasks without “coding”

This is an example to get you comfortable with PowerShell by using a target that you are comfortable with and can recognise.

## Create a smo object provide your host\instance after -SqlInstance 
$SMO = Connect-DbaSqlServer -SqlInstance ROB-XPS\sql2016

Now that we have an object we can explore it

$SMO

By just calling the variable it will display the default properties

06 - default properties.png

If you want to see what else is available you can use Get-Member You just pipe | to Get-Member

$SMO | Get-Member

This will show you all of the events, methods and properties available on the object.  Methods are really useful, enabling you to do things like start agent jobs or enumerate permissions or members

If you wish to see all of the processes that are running on the instance

$SMO.EnumProcesses() | Out-GridView

Out-GridView is a useful command allowing you to see the results of your command in a graphical format and easily filter using the search bar at the top.

07 - ogv.png

Other things you can do include reading the errorlog

$SMO.ReadErrorLog() | Out-GridView

08 - errorlog.png

Get the connections to a database

$smo.GetActiveDBConnectionCount('master')

Get the current Traceflags

$smo.EnumActiveCurrentSessionTraceFlags() 
$smo.EnumActiveGlobalTraceFlags()

The properties that are available at this level are similar to the view that you see in SSMS Object Explorer for the instance. You can see a databases folder in SSMS and you can expand it. You can do the same in PowerShell

$SMO.Databases.Name

That is going to just show you the names of the databases on that instance. You can do the same thing using the pipe | again and Select-Object

$Smo.Databases | Select-Object Name

This will pass the Databases array of objects “along the pipeline” and then you can use Select-Object to choose them. Multiple properties can be chosen with commas.

$smo.Databases|Select-Object Name, Collation, CreateDate, Owner, version

09 - databases.png

PowerShell will let you select things that do not exist so for example

$smo.Databases | Select Name, NumberofBeards, Owner, MoustacheLength,one

does not return an error but some of the columns are empty 🙂 You need to use the names of the properties returned from Get-Member in your Select statement (Hmm, sounds a bit like T-SQL)

18 select.png

You can look at a single database default properties using

$SMO.Database['NAMEOFDATABASE']

You can then use Get-Member to explore deeper and deeper.

You can also look at the Agent from the instance level object

$SMO.JobServer

HOMEWORK – Using the code above explore the $SMO object, look at the databases, tables, the columns and the indexes. Explore other properties and select them. (Extra merit points for exploring the SQL Server like a file system using the SQLServer drive. Start with cd SQLSERVER:\ and use Get-ChildItem or its alias dir or ls)

Warning Reminder – You do not have to use these methods to accomplish tasks in PowerShell against SQL Server as both Microsoft and the community have released modules which will enable you to do general tasks without “coding”

But this is a very useful way of understanding and exploring using PowerShell with a type of object that you understand. You will use these methods all of the time and when you need to accomplish the next thing you have the tools. Already. Now.

Recap

You should take from this for the future

  • Get-Command *search* – Find a Command
  • Get-Help NameOfCommand – How do I use the Command ?
  • $var = Some Command here – Set the output of a command to a variable
  • $var | Get-Member – What Events, Methods, Properties do I have on this object
  • $var | Select Property1, Property2, Property3

That’s All Code – Where’s The Easy Buttons ?

There are two answers to this.

Firstly, yes it’s all code, but you will find that code is the future. Every time you run the same piece of code it will do the same thing, every time a junior DBA follows the steps to manually do something in a GUI like SSMS they may make a mistake and a different mistake each time. As DBAs we use stored procedures, views, functions and more, they are all code. Using code is vital for automation, for making things easy, for reducing the risk of mistakes, for getting rid of the mundane.

It is also required for DevopsAgileScrumContinuousIntegrationDeliveryWhatsTheNextBuzzWord which is all the rage (and also a lot of fun with interesting challenges)

As estates get bigger and bigger the GUI becomes less useful to you.

Secondly, remember my warning at the top of this post? There is no easy button. You will have to learn new things you will make mistakes and get errors, you need to ask for help

I Have An ERROR !

Don’t be disheartened, errors happen. The red text looks scary and frightening but its not.

Read the Error

Lets use Microsofts sqlserver module. There are all sorts of ways to get it. If you have SSMS you probably have it already. Lets check

Get-Module sqlserver

A result like this means that you have it

10 - get-module.png

If not

Install-Module sqlserver -Scope CurrentUser

Again you will be asked if you want to trust the repository, say yes!

If I run

Get-SqlLogin -ServerInstance rob-xps

I get

11 - error.png

That error is fairly easy to understand. I can’t connect to an instance that isn’t running

If I run

Get-SqlLogin -ServerInstance rob-xps\sql2016 -LoginName rob

I get a different error

12 sql login error.png

The Get-SqlLogin from Microsofts sqlserver module returns an error if it cannot find the specified login name. The important part of this error message is ObjectNotFound. That tells us what has happened

If we look at the logins

Get-SqlLogin -ServerInstance rob-xps\sql2016 | Select Name

13 - Logins.png

and choose one that exists everything is good

14 one login.png

HOMEWORK – Here is another object to explore with Get-Member. Explore the Login object

For example

15 - login script.png

But back to errors. Sometimes it isn’t quite so obvious. I have altered my Create-Database function so that it shows an error instead of a helpful message.

16 - db error.png

This is an example of the sort of error message that you might not be able to decipher so easily. Even if you read the message it says Exception calling .ctor with 2 arguments. How can you, as a new PowerShell user work out what has happened?

Objects

Remember, PowerShell is great because of objects? The errors are objects too. Lets have a look at the error in full. This is another piece of code that I still use every single day

$error[0] | fl -force

The $error variable holds an array of error objects for that session. The [0] targets the 1st object in the array which is the latest. We pipe that to fl which is an alias for Format-List. Normally I am very clear about not using aliases in my blog posts as I believe that you should not use aliases in your scripts and functions (This is due to a bad experience trying to google for % to find out what it was in PowerShell many years ago). However, you are only going to use this at the command line so its ok.

The results are

17 error.png

Once you read the error, you will see that there is a generic connection failed error message which you will be used to seeing and now you can go about fixing it.

Errors aren’t scary. You just have to read them. Sometimes you have to expand them to read them. Once you have read them don’t forget that there is also a lot of help out there on the internet. I recommend the #powershellhelp channel in the slack but with the full error message you will be able to get some useful results from whatever your choice of helpful solutions is.

That’s exactly 3000 words – which is slightly (!) more than I intended to write and a lot to read, so if you have got all the way down here. Congratulations, when you see me at Summit or at a SQL Saturday come up and tell me and I will give you a special sticker 🙂

Hopefully this has given you some guidance to starting to use PowerShell with SQL and how you can help yourself.

Good luck.

Getting SQL Server File Sizes and Space Used with dbatools

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I read a great blog post about answering the question how big is the database using T-SQL on SQL Buffet and wondered how much I could do with the dbatools module

The dbatools module (for those that don’t know) is a PowerShell module written by amazing folks in the community designed to make administrating your SQL Server significantly easier using PowerShell. The instructions for installing it are available here It comprises of 182 separate commands at present (11 March 2017 Version 0.8.938)

I know that there is a Get-DBADatabaseFreeSpace Command written by Mike Fal b | t and using Glenn Berry’s diagnostic queries

First thing as always is to look at the help

 Get-Help Get-DbaDatabaseFreespace -ShowWindow

which will show you the help for the command and some examples

Lets look at the details for a single instance

 Get-DbaDatabaseFreespace -sqlserver $server

This is what it looks like

02 - singel server.gif

and yes it really is that fast, I have not speeded this up. 232 ms to get those details for an instance with 19 databases

03 - Measure Command.PNG

What information do you get ? Lets look at the information for a single database, you get an object for each file

Server               : SQL2014SER12R2
Database             : DBA-Admin
FileName             : DBA-Admin_System
FileGroup            : PRIMARY
PhysicalName         : F:\DBA-Admin_System.MDF
FileType             : ROWS
UsedSpaceMB          : 3
FreeSpaceMB          : 253
FileSizeMB           : 256
PercentUsed          : 1
AutoGrowth           : 0
AutoGrowType         : MB
SpaceUntilMaxSizeMB  : 16777213
AutoGrowthPossibleMB : 0
UnusableSpaceMB      : 16777213
Server               : SQL2014SER12R2
Database             : DBA-Admin
FileName             : DBA-Admin_Log
FileGroup            :
PhysicalName         : G:\DBA-Admin_Log.LDF
FileType             : LOG
UsedSpaceMB          : 32
FreeSpaceMB          : 224
FileSizeMB           : 256
PercentUsed          : 12
AutoGrowth           : 256
AutoGrowType         : MB
SpaceUntilMaxSizeMB  : 2528
AutoGrowthPossibleMB : 2304
UnusableSpaceMB      : 0
Server               : SQL2014SER12R2
Database             : DBA-Admin
FileName             : DBA-Admin_User
FileGroup            : UserFG
PhysicalName         : F:\DBA-Admin_User.NDF
FileType             : ROWS
UsedSpaceMB          : 1
FreeSpaceMB          : 255
FileSizeMB           : 256
PercentUsed          : 0
AutoGrowth           : 256
AutoGrowType         : MB
SpaceUntilMaxSizeMB  : 5119
AutoGrowthPossibleMB : 4864
UnusableSpaceMB      : 0
There is a lot of useful information returned for each file. Its better if you use Out-GridView as then you can order by columns and filter in the top bar.
04 - single server ogv.gif

 

As always, PowerShell uses the permissions of the account running the sessions to connect to the SQL Server unless you provide a separate credential for SQL Authentication. If you need to connect with a different windows account you will need to hold Shift down and right click on the PowerShell icon and click run as a different user.

Lets get the information for a single database. The command has dynamic parameters which populate the database names to save you time and keystrokes

05 dynamic parameters.gif

But you may want to gather information about more than one server. lets take a list of servers and place them into a variable. You can add your servers to this variable in a number of ways, maybe by querying your CMDB or using your registered servers or central management server

$SQLServers = 'SQL2005Ser2003','SQL2012Ser08AG3','SQL2012Ser08AG1','SQL2012Ser08AG2','SQL2014Ser12R2','SQL2016N1','SQL2016N2','SQL2016N3','SQLVnextN1','SQLvNextN2'

and then

Get-DbaDatabaseFreespace -SqlInstance $SQLServers | Out-GridView

 

06 - Many servers ogv.PNG

As you can see, you get a warning quite correctly, that the information for the asynchronous secondary node of the availability group databases is not available and I did not have all of my servers running so there are a couple of could not connect warnings as well. You can still filter very quickly. dbatools is tested from SQL2000 to SQL vNext as you can see below (although I don’t have a SQL2000 instance)

07 - filter ogv

 

Not only on Windows, this command will work against SQL running on Linux as well

08 - linux.PNG

So if we want to know the total size of the files on disk for  the database we need to look at the FileSizeMB property

$server = 'SQL2014Ser12R2'
$dbName = 'AdventureWorksDW2014'
Get-DbaDatabaseFreespace -SqlServer $server -database $dbName |
Select Database,FileName,FileSizeMB

Of course that’s an easy calculation here

08a - filesize.PNG

but if we have numerous files then it may be tougher. we can use the Measure-Object command to sum the properties. We need to do a bit of preparation here and set a couple of calculated properties to make it more readable

$server = 'SQL2014Ser12R2'
$dbName = 'AdventureWorksDW2014'
$database = @{Name = 'Database'; Expression = {$dbname}}
$FileSize = @{Name = 'FileSize'; Expression = {$_.Sum}}
Get-DbaDatabaseFreespace -SqlServer $server -database $dbName |
Select Database,FileSizeMB |
Measure-Object FileSizeMB -Sum |
Select $database ,Property, $filesize

09 - filessize

Maybe we want to look at all of the databases on an instance. Again, we have to do a little more work here

$server = 'SQL2014Ser12R2'
$srv = Connect-DbaSqlServer $server
$SizeonDisk = @()
$srv.Databases |ForEach-Object {
$dbName = $_.Name
$database = @{Name = 'Database'; Expression = {$dbname}}
$FileSize = @{Name = 'FileSize'; Expression = {$_.Sum}}
$SizeOnDisk += Get-DbaDatabaseFreespace -SqlServer $server -database $dbName | Select Database,FileSizeMB |  Measure-Object FileSizeMb -Sum | Select $database ,Property, $Filesize
}
$SizeOnDisk

10 - size on disk

If we wanted the databases ordered by the size of their files we could do this

$SizeOnDisk |Sort-Object Filesize -Descending

11 - size sorted.PNG

As it is PowerShell we have an object and we can use it any way we like. Maybe we want that information in a text file or a csv or an excel file or in an email, PowerShell can do that

 ## In a text file
$SizeonDisk | Out-file C:\temp\Sizeondisk.txt
Invoke-Item C:\temp\Sizeondisk.txt
## In a CSV
$SizeonDisk | Export-Csv C:\temp\Sizeondisk.csv -NoTypeInformation
notepad C:\temp\Sizeondisk.csv
## Email
Send-MailMessage -SmtpServer $smtp -From DBATeam@TheBeard.local -To JuniorDBA-Smurf@TheBeard.Local `
-Subject "Smurf this needs looking At" -Body $SizeonDisk
## Email as Attachment
Send-MailMessage -SmtpServer $smtp -From DBATeam@TheBeard.local -To JuniorDBA-Smurf@TheBeard.Local `
-Subject "Smurf this needs looking At" -Body "Smurf" -Attachments C:\temp\Sizeondisk.csv

I had a little play with Boe Prox PoshCharts (you have to use the dev branch) to see if I could get some nice charts and unfortunately the bar charts did not come out so well but luckily the donut and pie charts did. (I’m a DBA I love donuts!)

$SizeonDisk| Out-PieChart -XField Database -YField FileSize -Title "UsedSpaceMB per Database on $Server" -IncludeLegend -Enable3D
$SizeonDisk| Out-DoughnutChart -XField Database -YField FileSize -Title "UsedSpaceMB per Database on $Server" -IncludeLegend -Enable3D

12 - donuts.PNG

So the point is, whatever you or your process requires you can pretty much bet that PowerShell can enable it for you to automate.

You can make use of all of the properties exposed by the command. If you want to only see the files with less than 20% space free

 Get-DbaDatabaseFreespace -SqlServer $server | Where-Object {$_.PercentUsed -gt 80}

13 - percent used.PNG

you can also use the command to check for file growth settings as well

 Get-DbaDatabaseFreespace -SqlServer $server | Where-Object {$_.AutoGrowType  -ne 'Mb'}

14 - autogrowth.PNG

Or maybe you want to know the FileSize, Used and Free Space per database

 $server = 'SQL2014Ser12R2'
$srv = Connect-DbaSqlServer $server
$SizeonDisk = @()
$srv.Databases |ForEach-Object {
$dbName = $_.Name
$database = @{Name = 'Database'; Expression = {$dbname}}
$MB = @{Name = 'Mbs'; Expression = {$_.Sum}}
$SizeOnDisk += Get-DbaDatabaseFreespace -SqlServer $server -database $dbName | Select Database,FileSizeMB, UsedSpaceMB, FreeSpaceMb |  Measure-Object FileSizeMb , UsedSpaceMB, FreeSpaceMb -Sum  | Select $database ,Property, $Mb
}
$SizeOnDisk

15 totals.PNG

Hopefully that has given you a quick insight into another one of the fabulous dbatools commands. Any questions, comment below or head over to the SQL Server Community Slack via https://sqlps.io/slack

Happy Automating

 

NOTE – The major 1.0 release of dbatools due in the summer 2017 may have breaking changes which will stop the above code from working. There are also new commands coming which may replace this command. This blog post was written using dbatools version 0.8.942 You can check your version using

 Get-Module dbatools

and update it using an Administrator PowerShell session with

 Update-Module dbatools

You may find that you get no output from Update-Module as you have the latest version. If you have not installed the module from the PowerShell Gallery using

 Install-Module dbatools

Then you can use

 Update-dbatools

 

Quickly Creating Test Users in SQL Server with PowerShell using the sqlserver module and dbatools

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One of the most visited posts on my blog is nearly two and half years old now – Add User to SQL Server Database Role with PowerShell and Quickly Creating Test Users. I thought it was time to update it and use the latest sqlserver module and the dbatools module.

You can get the latest version of the sqlserver module by installing SSMS 2016. The PASS PowerShell Virtual Chapter have created a short link to make this easier for you to remember: https://sqlps.io/dl

Once you have downloaded and installed SSMS you can load the module.

Import-Module sqlserver

There is one situation where you will get an error loading the sqlserver module into PowerShell. If you have the SQLPS module already imported then you will get the following error:

Import-Module : The following error occurred while loading the extended type data file:

sqlserver-module-error

In that case you will need to remove the SQLPS module first.

Remove-Module sqlps
Import-Module sqlserver

The original post dealt with creating a number of test users for a database and assigning them to different roles quickly and easily.

First let’s quickly create a list of Admin users and a list of Service Users and save them in a text file.

$i = 0
while($I -lt 100)
{
"Beard_Service_User$i" | Out-File 'C:\temp\Users.txt' -Append
$i++
}

$i = 0
while($I -lt 10)
{
"Beard_Service_Admin_$i" | Out-File 'C:\temp\Admins.txt' -Append
$i++
}

Now that we have those users in files we can assign them to a variable by using Get-Content

$Admins = Get-Content 'C:\temp\Admins.txt'

Of course we can use any source for our users – a database, an excel file, Active Directory or even just type them in.

We can use the Add-SQLLogin command from the sqlserver module to add our users as SQL Logins, but at present we cannot add them as database users and assign them to a role.

If we want to add a Windows Group or a Windows User to our SQL Server we can do so using:

Add-SqlLogin -ServerInstance $Server -LoginName $User -LoginType WindowsUser -DefaultDatabase tempdb -Enable -GrantConnectSql

Notice that we need to enable and grant connect SQL to the user.

If we want to add a SQL login the code is pretty much the same but we either have to enter the password in an authentication box or pass in a PSCredential object holding the username and password. Keeping credentials secure in PowerShell scripts is outside the scope of this post and the requirement is for none-live environments so we will pass in the same password for all users as a string to the script. You may want or be required to achieve this in a different fashion.

 $Pass = ConvertTo-SecureString -String $Password -AsPlainText -Force
$Credential = New-Object -TypeName System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -ArgumentList $User, $Pass
Add-SqlLogin -ServerInstance $Server -LoginName $User -LoginType $LoginType -DefaultDatabase tempdb -Enable -GrantConnectSql -LoginPSCredential $Credential

We can ensure that we are not trying to add logins that already exist using

 if(!($srv.Logins.Contains($User)))
{

The $srv is a SQL Server Management Server Object which you can create using a snippet. I blogged about snippets here and you can find my list of snippets on github here. However, today I am going to use the dbatools module to create a SMO Server Object using the Connect-DbaSqlServer command and assign the server and the database to a variable:

 # Create a SQL Server SMO Object
$srv = Connect-DbaSqlServer -SqlServer $server
$db = $srv.Databases[$Database]

Once we have our Logins we need to create our database users:

 $usr = New-Object ('Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.User') ($db, $User)
$usr.Login = $User
$usr.Create()

and add them to a database role.

#Add User to the Role
$db.roles[$role].AddMember($User)

I created a little function to call in the script and then simply loop through our users and admins and call the function.

foreach($User in $Users)
{
Add-UserToRole -Password $Password -User $user -Server $server -Role $Userrole  -LoginType SQLLogin
}

foreach($User in $Admins)
{
Add-UserToRole -Password $Password -User $user -Server $server -Role $adminrole  -LoginType SQLLogin
}

To check that they have been added correctly I simply use the Get-DbaRoleMember command from dbatools and output it to Out-GridView using the alias ogv as I am on the command line:

Get-DbaRoleMember -SqlInstance $server |ogv

which looks like this:

 

get-dbarole-memebr

Once we need to clean up the logins and users we can use the Get-SQLLogin and Remove-SQLLogin commands from the sqlserver module to remove the logins and if we do that first we can then use the dbatools command Remove-SQLOrphanuser to remove the orphaned users 🙂 (I thought that was rather cunning!)

(Get-SqlLogin -ServerInstance $server).Where{$_.Name -like '*Beard_Service_*'}|Remove-SqlLogin

Remove-SQLOrphanUser -SqlServer $Server -databases $database

The Remove-SQLLogin will prompt for confirmation and the result of the Remove-SQLOrphanUser looks like this

remove-them-all

When you are looking at doing this type of automation with PowerShell, you should remember always to make use of Get-Command, Get-Help and Get-Member. That will enable you to work out how to do an awful lot. I have a short video on youtube about this:

 

and when you get stuck come and ask in the SQL Server Slack at https://sqlps.io/slack. You will find a powershellhelp channel in there.

Here is the complete code:

#Requires -module sqlserver
#Requires -module dbatools

### Define some variables
$server = ''
$Password = "Password"
$Database = 'TheBeardsDatabase'
$Admins = Get-Content 'C:\temp\Admins.txt'
$Users = Get-Content 'C:\temp\Users.txt'
$LoginType = 'SQLLogin'
$userrole =  'Users'
$adminrole = 'Admin'

# Create a SQL Server SMO Object
$srv = Connect-DbaSqlServer -SqlServer $server
$db = $srv.Databases[$Database]

function Add-UserToRole
{
param
(
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true,
ValueFromPipeline=$true,
ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true,
ValueFromRemainingArguments=$false)]
[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]
[string]$Password,
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true,
ValueFromPipeline=$true,
ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true,
ValueFromRemainingArguments=$false)]
[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]
[string]$User,
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true,
ValueFromPipeline=$true,
ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true,
ValueFromRemainingArguments=$false)]
[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]
[string]$Server,
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true,
ValueFromPipeline=$true,
ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true,
ValueFromRemainingArguments=$false)]
[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]
[string]$Role,
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true,
ValueFromPipeline=$true,
ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true,
ValueFromRemainingArguments=$false)]
[ValidateSet("SQLLogin", "WindowsGroup", "WindowsUser")]
[string]$LoginType
)

if(!($srv.Logins.Contains($User)))
{
if($LoginType -eq 'SQLLogin')
{
$Pass = ConvertTo-SecureString -String $Password -AsPlainText -Force
$Credential = New-Object -TypeName System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -ArgumentList $User, $Pass
Add-SqlLogin -ServerInstance $Server -LoginName $User -LoginType $LoginType -DefaultDatabase tempdb -Enable -GrantConnectSql -LoginPSCredential $Credential
}
elseif($LoginType -eq 'WindowsGroup' -or $LoginType -eq 'WindowsUser')
{
Add-SqlLogin -ServerInstance $Server -LoginName $User -LoginType $LoginType -DefaultDatabase tempdb -Enable -GrantConnectSql
}
}
if (!($db.Users.Contains($User)))
{

# Add user to database

$usr = New-Object ('Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.User') ($db, $User)
$usr.Login = $User
$usr.Create()

}
#Add User to the Role
$db.roles[$role].AddMember($User)
}

foreach($User in $Users)
{
Add-UserToRole -Password $Password -User $user -Server $server -Role $Userrole -LoginType SQLLogin
}

foreach($User in $Admins)
{
Add-UserToRole -Password $Password -User $user -Server $server -Role $adminrole -LoginType SQLLogin
}

Get-DbaRoleMember -SqlInstance $server |ogv

Happy Automating!