Automation T-SQL Tuesday was started by Adam Machanic (blog|twitter) is hosted by a different person each month. The host selects the theme, and then the blogging begins. worldwide, on the second Tuesday of the month (all day, based on GMT time), bloggers attend this party by blogging about the theme. This month it is hosted by Elizabeth Noble blog and twitter. Thank you Elizabeth Elizabeth asks My invitation to you is I want to know what you have automated to make your life easier? From the Past I am in the process of migrating my blog to GitHub pages and whilst doing so, I read my first e ..read more

Following on from my posts about using Secret Management Good bye Import-CliXml and running programmes as a different user, I have another use case. After creating Azure SQL Databases in an Elastic Pool using a process pretty similar to this one I blogged about last year, I needed to be able to programmatically create users and assign permissions. I need a user to login with When I created my Azure SQL Server with Terraform, I set the Azure Admin to be a SPN as you can see in the image from the portal and set it to have an identity using the documentation for azurerm_mssql_server. This allows ..read more

Following on from yesterdays post about creating an overview of SQL Agent Job Results and sending it to a Teams channel, I was given another challenge Can you write a job step that I can add to SQL Agent jobs that can send the result of that job to a Teams Channel A person with a need The use case was for some migration projects that had steps that were scheduled via SQL Agent Jobs and instead of the DBA having to estimate when they would finish and keep checking so that they could let the next team know that it was time for their part to start, they wanted it to notify a Teams channel. This ..read more

Microsoft Teams is fantastic for collaboration. It enables groups of people, teams if you like to be able to communicate, collaborate on documents, hold meetings and much much more. SQL Agent Job Overview Using dbatools we can create a simple script to gather the results of Agent Jobs form a list of instances. Maybe it would be good to be able to get the job runs results every 12 hours so that at 6am in the morning the early-bird DBA can quickly identify if there are any failures that need immediate action and at 6pm , the team can check that everything was ok before they clock off. Here is an ..read more

Following on from my last post about the Secret Management module. I was asked another question. > Can I use this to run applications as my admin account? A user with a beard It is good practice to not log into your work station with an account with admin privileges. In many shops, you will need to open applications that can do administration tasks with another set of account credentials. Unfortunately, people being people, they will often store their admin account credentials in a less than ideal manner (OneNote, Notepad ++ etc) to make it easier for them, so that when they right click an ..read more

Don’t want to read all this? There are two dotnet interactive notebooks here with the relevant information for you to use. https://beard.media/dotnetnotebooks Jaap is awesome I have to start here. For the longest time, whenever anyone has asked me how I store my credentials for use in my demos and labs I have always referred them to Jaap Brassers t blog post https://www.jaapbrasser.com/quickly-and-securely-storing-your-credentials-powershell/ Joel is also awesome! When people wanted a method of storing credentials that didnt involve files on disk I would suggest Joel Bennett’s t module Bette ..read more

I have always been extremely proud to be a Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP, and lucky enough to be involved with both the PowerShell community as well as the Data Platform community. Today, July 1st is the date that many MVPs receive their renewal email to let them know that they have been awarded for another year. There is a lot of F5’ing and frequent checking of emails and “Have you heard yet?” DMs going around. When I received the news, I was using Azure DevOps to run PowerShell and Terraform to build an Azure SQL Elastic Pool (yes, I will write a blog post about it!). I love technology ..read more

Azure Data Studio is a great tool for connecting with your data platform whether it is in Azure or on your hardware. Jupyter Notebooks are fantastic, you can have words, pictures, code and code results all saved in one document. I have created a repository in my Github https://beard.media/Notebooks where I have stored a number of Jupyter notebooks both for Azure Data Studio and the new .NET interactive notebooks. Another thing that you can do with notebooks is run them as Agent Jobs and save the results of the run. Notebooks running T-SQL This works easily for T-SQL notebooks. I a ..read more

I am sat in the PowerShell Saturday in Hamburg. You can see me on the right of this picture writing my previous blog post! @JanDamaschke spricht über Asynchrones Logging in #powershell mit Classes und Runspaces!@hhpsug #pssaturday pic.twitter.com/aCbT8p3GFs— Christoph Burmeister (@chrburmeister) February 22, 2020 I was talking with my friend Mathias Jessen @IISResetMe on Twitter about notebooks and he said that another great use case was to use them on Stack OverFlow Now Mathias is an active answerer on Stack OverFlow and he puts a lot of effort into writing his answers, formatting ..read more