Personal Weblog of John Wood

Powershell is a fantastic tool to use for management of multiple computers. I have been slowly converting many of our administrative functions from a hodge-podge mixture of CMD, BAT, VPS, Python, and Perl scripts. One daily administrative talks is copying a variety of backups from a variety of Windows servers to our data ’warehouse’ where they are then copied to tape.

I recently found the “Jobs” cmdlets in Powershell V2.0. With “Jobs” you can asynchronously process multiple tasks (e.g. copying backups from many remote machines to data storage on the current local machine). In my case, running the copies synchronously results in the process spanning over to the next morning. Backups are stored daily. If a backup is taken on Wednesday, I can’t have it being stored in our warehouse under Thursday.

Continue reading ‘Asynchronous Processing using Powershell Jobs’ »

Don’t you just hate it when you open one of your server logs in Management Studio and then you have to wait forever to review it because it never stops reading? I’ve done it enough times and decided to put an end to it or at least greatly reduce the incidence.

Using Powershell and a simple script to execute Sp_Cycle_Errorlog, I now have a weekly, Windows scheduled task which executes the sproc to cycle the logs for all my SQL Servers.

foreach ($svr in get-content D:\Scripts\Servers.TXT ){
    $svr
    Invoke-Expression 'SQLCMD -E -S $svr -Q "Exec Sp_Cycle_Errorlog"' | Out-Null
	}

This is a wonderful article which not only details the use of Compare-Object but also provides some very excellent examples on its use.

Tips & Tricks Using Compare-Object – Dreaming in PowerShell – PowerShell.com

I am very new to PowerShell but I am beginning to like using it considerably more each day. I recently had a need for a quick and easy way to script a process which would copy only new files from one location to another. after scouring the Internet for a good example, I stumbled upon the Compare-Object cmdlet and this excellent article.

The actual script I came up with is rather simple and serves my purpose exactly. As I  mentioned, I am new to PowerShell and there may very well be a better method. However, this one works for me.

The script code:

param(
    [string]$s = '\\serverx\c$\ProgramData\Polaris\3.5\SQLVS1\AuthorityUpdates',
    [string]$t = '\\servery\data03\shared\libraries\zmarc'
)

$target = Get-ChildItem $t
$source = get-childitem $s
Compare-Object $source $target -Property Name -PassThru |
    Where-Object { $_.SideIndicator -eq '<=' } |
    foreach-object -process{
        copy-item $_.FullName -destination $t
        }