Professional SQL Server 2012 Internals and Troubleshooting

Chapter 14

Enhancing Your Troubleshooting Toolset with PowerShell

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Introducing PowerShell
• Getting started with PowerShell
• Using PowerShell to investigate server issues
• Proactively tuning SQL Server performance with PowerShell

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=1118177657 on the Download Code tab. The code is in the Chapter 14 download and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

INTRODUCING POWERSHELL

System administrators are realizing the productivity gains that can be achieved from PowerShell, the unified scripting environment provided by Microsoft. Reusing scripts of commonly executed tasks is much faster and less error prone than repeatedly clicking through dialogs.

PowerShell was first unveiled to the world at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference with a code name of Monad in 2003. Following a beta release, version 1 was officially released in 2006, and since then PowerShell has become a deeply integrated component of Windows. Indeed, SQL Server 2012 takes PowerShell so seriously that PowerShell 2.0 is a prerequisite, and SQL Server will not install if PowerShell is not already installed on the system. The initial SQL Server and PowerShell integration that started out with the SQL Server Database Engine now provides support for SSIS and SSAS in SQL Server 2012. PowerShell is also still in active development, which proceeds ...