Sometimes it’s useful to get a quick overview of what objects are referencing a particular table, view or function. This may arise when we think we may need to drop an object but want to double-check if anything in the database is still referencing it. Here’s a quick solution in the form of a Powershell [...]

After the recent change in our clocks due to BST I noticed that one of our servers was a hour slow. I wanted to check the rest since we run a lot of time dependant processes. Now we have Powershell any thought of manually checking each one is madness. Here’s a quick script I knocked [...]

Here’s neat little Powershell script you can use to audit your SQL Server databases. The script is dependant on the SQL Browser service, to discover instances, so you will need to make sure this is running. This will allow you to audit all SQL Server instances on the localhost with details of your databases and [...]

The London Datastore has loads of datasets available that we can use for free. One of the datasets available is a list of TFL Station Locations. The station location feed is a geo-coded KML feed of most of London Underground, DLR and London Overground stations. Here’s Powershell script that will extract this data from a [...]

I’m looking at building some Powershell scripts that can accept user input to perform different tasks with a wizard style interface. As it happens this is fairly easily achieved with the Read-Host cmdlet. Here’s a quick script showing how such a powershell script may look. ?View Code POWERSHELLfunction mainMenu() { Clear-Host; Write-Host "============"; Write-Host "= [...]

Here’s a Powershell script that can be used to manage index fragmentation in SQL Server databases. The strategy I’ve used in the script is based on a recommendation from Pinal Dave (blog | twitter) in his article  Difference Between Index Rebuild and Index Reorganize Explained with T-SQL Script. Just set the $sqlserver and $database variables [...]

Here’s a Powershell snippet that randomly sorts the lines in a file. The snippet below reads a text file, called file.txt, located in your user profile directory. The data in the file will be written back with the lines in a different order. ?View Code POWERSHELL$data = New-Object System.Object; $data = Get-Content "$Env:USERPROFILE\file.txt"; # Random [...]

I really used to like apt-get when I used to run Linux as my home os a few years ago. Once you got the hang of it installing and managing software was easy. I’m obviously pleased to see PsFetch in development. This tool is the Windows Powershell take on apt-get which will allow you to [...]

I’m really into Powershell so I like trying out all the available tools. Somehow I’ve missed the release of the PowershellShellPack which has ten modules offering all kinds of additional functionality including file handling, operating system information, GUI and code generation. I followed the Channel 9 video and ran into a problem on the first [...]

One of the great things about Powershell is its ability to take advantage of the .Net platform. If Powershell can’t do it you bet there’s a .Net library that can. Not only is this great for extending your scripts but I also like to use Powershell to test some of my classes. Rather than fire [...]