I needed to figure out a method for producing alerts when a domain account is approaching the password reset date. Here it is in a few lines of Powershell… ?View Code POWERSHELL# Set name here $name = "Rhys Campbell"; $user = Get-ADUser -LDAPFilter "(Name=$name)" -Properties PasswordLastSet; $days = $(Get-ADDefaultDomainPasswordPolicy).MaxPasswordAge; $expires = $user.PasswordLastSet + $days; $days_left [...]

A few days ago a developer came to me with a query that was executing slowly on a staging server. On this server it took 16 long seconds to execute while on other servers it took about 1 second. I did a quick schema compare and found them to be identical. So I ran the [...]

Disk alignment has been well discussed on the web and the methods to check this always seem to use wmic or DISKPART. I’ve always loathed wmi so here’s a few lines of Powershell that achieves the same thing; ?View Code POWERSHELL$sqlserver = "sqlinstance"; # Get disk partitions $partitions = Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $sqlserver -Class Win32_DiskPartition; $partitions [...]

I’ve been reading a bit about VLFs (Virtual Log Files) this week. I’ve found quite a few interesting links, especially this one, informing us that there’s such a thing as too few or too many VLFs. We can view details about VLFs using the DBCC LOGINFO TSQL command. This only works against the current database [...]