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15 articles from the notebook.
The Problem One of the initiatives I’ve been working toward with my team this year is automating as much of our SQL Server patching as possible. Over time our environment has become increasingly complex, and while…
Read articleBackground My colleague and I were recently looking for ways to improve our production Availabiity Group nodes. These are beefy machines with a large amount of memory, and things like buffer cache scans can be lengthy.…
Read articleI was doing some volunteer work recently when it came to my attention that there was a large number of enabled users in their Active Directory environment. This number was far greater than the amount of active…
Read articleIntroduction Not long ago Microsoft proclaimed to us that they love Linux. And while many remain skeptical of that assertion (and not without reason), the tech giant is continually pouring more time and resources into…
Read articleI recently moved into a new role and needed to to be added to a number of AD groups. An often-used method for this is to model a new employee’s permissions after someone already in the same role. For one or two groups…
Read articleBelow is a quick script I’ve been working on for a colleague. Its simple purpose is to query an AD group then display each member’s username and the email address of their manager. Hopefully this will help others…
Read articleAs I’ve mentioned in other posts, Desired State Configuration (DSC) is a powerful technology with a lot of potential. However, due to how new it is and how rapidly it’s evolving, it can be difficult to get started and…
Read article(Update: I’ve since discovered that SqlServerDsc has replaced xSQLServer.) One of my growing passions is using PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) to automate all the things. I started out with simple…
Read articleUpdate (04/01/2019): We’ve hit over 100 downloads for PSOraenv! A big thanks to the PowerShell community. Please keep using it and let me know how I can make it better. ******* Most of my experience with Oracle has been…
Read articleRecently I’ve been looking into the potential that Windows Server Core holds for our environment. Like most eager new Core users, I imagine, I jumped in with grand visions of spinning up a VM quickly and being off to…
Read articleA project I’ve been wanting to work on for a long time is how to automate restores of our Production databases to the Test instance. There are a number of challenges associated with this. First, the restore has to be…
Read articleIn the past we’ve explored how to use PowerShell to automate failovers on SQL Failover Clusters for Windows Updates and other scheduled maintenance. But what if you’re using Availability Groups instead of the…
Read articleIn SQL Server, a login is an instance level object that is used for authentication. It is mapped to a database user, which controls permissions at the database level. These objects (login and user) are tied to one…
Read articleIt’s an odd truth that laziness leads to better systems administration. That is, so long as it spurs you to automate and thoroughly document a repetitive or tedious task. For instance, I was recently tasked with…
Read articleAs much as we’d all like to set up our SQL instances and never again let anyone touch them, that’s just not possible in real life. We live in a world where entities, for good or for evil, are constantly exposing…
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