Installing SQL Server 2008 gives you SQLPS.exe, an application you can run which is a PowerShell including the PSDrives for SQL Server (and compatible with SQL Server 2005 as well!). But how do you make this work with your current copy of PowerShell? Well, I just worked this out. Darren Gosbell was lamenting with me about the fact that it's ...

I've written before that SQL Server 2008 (February CTP) gives you SQLPS - a PowerShell interface to SQL Server. So I was trying to get the ScriptingOptions happening, and this is the only way I've found so far. It's ugly, and if you have a better way of doing this, please post a comment for me. ...

So suppose you've created a default constraint without specifying the name (on a SQL Server 2005 machine). You do know the table and column, of course - you just don't have the name of the default constraint. Now you want to find the name so that you can drop the constraint. A nice query against the system catalog views can help. ...

Last week I presented at my user-group about PowerShell and why every DBA should know this. The talk went for just over an hour, and as most of the audience hadn't used PowerShell at all, I started from the top and really pushed concepts like ''You pipe objects not text''. The script can be downloaded from here. So then by the time I got around ...

Because I've been playing with PowerShell more and more recently, I'm going to do a talk at my user-group about it next week. Should be a lot of fun, and a great excuse to get deeper into the technology over the weekend. One thing that I think is really great is the ease with which you can apply things to a list, because of the pipe operator - ...