Everyday Powershell - Part 13 - Working with SQL Server in powershell

This is the next part in an ongoing series about Powershell. You may have heard about how awesome Powershell is but have struggled to find ways to make it useful in your day to day work. That's what this series is going to address. It'll provide scripts and knowledge to address practical everyday problems


Today's script isn't very long. It's difficult to write SQL that will work on generic servers. This line will list the all the Databases on a given SQL server.


invoke-sqlcmd -ServerInstance "SOMESQLSERVER" -Query "SELECT * FROM [master].[dbo].[sysdatabases]"

Yes that's right you can send a SQL query off to your DB server and get the results back as a powershell object! This is freaking amazing! You'll have to use a bit of imagination and think up ways to make SQL queries in your environment, but once you start coming up with scenarios you won't stop! There are any number of powerful combinations possible when you can pull SQL data into powershell. 

We've just implemented a monitoring script that checks a table for new rows and if there aren't any new rows within the last ten minutes it emails us.

Add-PSSnapin SqlServerCmdletSnapin100 $test = invoke-sqlcmd -ServerInstance "SOMESQLSERVER" -Query "SELECT top 1 *   FROM [SOMEDATABASE].[dbo].[SOMETABLE]   order by [CreationDate] desc" $tenminutesago = (get-date).addminutes(-10) foreach ($item in $test) {     if ($item.creationdate -lt $tenminutesago)     {         Send-MailMessage -SmtpServer SOMEMAILSERVER -from SOMEONE@SOMEDOMAIN.COM -to SOMEONE@SOMEDOMAIN.COM -subject "No data since $today" -Body $item     } }

To make this invoke-sqlcmd work we need to install the SQL management tools. We've done this by running the SQL 2012 installer wizard and making sure Management tools are ticked. Also in some OS configuration we've had to load the snapin manually.

Add-PSSnapin SqlServerCmdletSnapin100

Jay Querido has a great write-up over on his blog on what to do if invoke-sqlcmd doesn't work.

We'll see what other SQL scripts we can come up with over the next few weeks. We want to give examples that will work anywhere so if you think of anything let us know.