Category Archives: Admin

Admin

2 Addictions worth fighting

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A recent email chain with a friend has spawned me to write this post.  What I’m trying to do here is help the 2 extremes of people you’ll find in your company:  the idiot, and the DBA.  Ok, I know all DBAs aren’t super smart, but I had to call the non-idiot something.  So this email chain I had was with a DBA who was stressing-out about something stupid his company is doing even though he warned them.  So what you’ve got to understand is that both sides of this equation are an addiction.

The Addiction of Stupidity:

It’s easy to get caught-up in the fact that our users are morons, or that the other IT guy is an idiot, but you’ve got to have a little compassion.  You have to understand that stupidity is an addiction.  It may have started through a combination of them not knowing anything at all about SQL, and them not having any qualified DBAs to help them learn.  How it started though doesn’t really matter in the end.  What does matter is that now you’ve got to help them through it.  You need to advise them on the proper way to do things.  At first they won’t listen.  Keep it up though and you’ll start to prove yourself a little at a time.  Then they’ll start to trust you.  Even when they trust you though, they’ll still fall back into being stupid all the time.  You have to urge them to fight it.  It’s hard though, right?  They really want to fall back into their old habits but you can’t let them.  It’s all they know and a little knowledge is empowering and dangerous.  So you have to guide them and not let them slip back into their bad habits of making stupid decisions.  Remind them that trusting you in the past has paid off and it will again. 

 

The Addiction of Caring:

The other side of this is the DBA himself.  See, as DBAs we tend to own the DBs under our control.  We want everything to work together like a well-rehearsed ballet.  And when it goes that way it can be a beautiful thing.  But it almost never goes that well, does it?  The company doesn’t see things the way we do.  The addicts in the above section quite often have the power to block our intelligent moves and even put things into play without us even knowing.  People in power are quite often worse than anyone else.  So how do you deal with this?  How do you get them to do the right thing?  Well, you can discuss it with them and get them to see reason, but if they don’t then you have to let it go. 

You’re not being paid to do a good job.  You’re being paid to make your boss happy.  I’ve said this many times before, and it’s still true.  Turn yourself into an internal fulltime consultant.  Advise them of the right thing to do, but if they make the wrong decision then it’s their business and their decision.  You can’t make them run their business the right way.  You can only advise them.  Remember that.  It’s not your business.  So stop insisting that things be done a certain way.  Tell them what should be done and let them make the decision.  And if they make the wrong decision just make sure you’re covered with an email.  You want it on record that you advised them correctly and they made the wrong decision.

But caring to the point where you’re pulling your hair out is just as much of an addiction as being stupid.  You have to constant remind yourself that you’re just a consultant and if they want to pay you a bloated salary to ignore you and have you spend your days cleaning their messes up instead of providing real value then that’s their business.  Again, you’re being paid to make them happy, not to do a good job.  Plenty of people disagree with me on this, but they’re wrong.  It just so happens that some bosses want you to do a good job and want you to guide the company, but that’s just a case where their priorities align with yours.  If their priorities were to change then I bet you’d find that you’re all of a sudden butting heads.  I’ve been in several companies where everyone in the world has sa and they’ve even got lots of apps connecting with sa and everyone knows the password.  I’ve advised them how unsafe this is, but they insisted that it’s too engrained and can’t be changed.  Fine, I put my advice in an email and went on about my business.  Things kept happening to the servers and they wanted it to stop, but I said I can’t stop it because everyone has sa.  They said it’s impossible.  So ok then.  Then they started failing audits.  They lost clients because they couldn’t produce  the report of the passed audit.  Now they came to me again and said how can we pass this audit.  I said you have to get everyone out of sa and do about 10 other things.  They said but the effort would be too great.  I said ok.  Then they lost another client.  Then they asked me what it would take to pass the audit.  I repeated the same thing.  They said it would be too hard.  I said ok.  They said can you give me another way?  I said no, but have you looked into what it would take?  What’s the actual effort?  They said no, we haven’t looked into it, but I know it would be really hard.  I said, then why not ask the question to the right people?  As it turns out it was a single VP who was blocking it because she had NO IT knowledge and just thought this kinda thing was really hard.  All they had to do was change a connection string in a .ini file and all was well.  Then they just told everyone to get over it and they weren’t getting sa anymore.  They would have to stop doing things that a DBA needs to do.  All of a sudden the environment became much more stable, they passed their next audit, and they started getting those contracts they were losing before.  That’s a true story BTW.

So find a way to divorce yourself from the outcome of these things.  I like to look at it like this… if you see a guy on the street getting into his car and he looks like he’s about to run the red light, and you call into his window and warn him there’s a cop sitting there, and he does it anyway you just look at him and say dumbass.  Chances are you probably won’t get upset and give yourself an ulcer over it because you’re just not that invested in the outcome of your advice.  You warned the guy but he didn’t listen… so what!  And that’s the attitude you have to take with your own company.  You can’t invest yourself in the outcome of your advice.  It’s not your company.

So anyway, I’m just trying to help you keep a little perspective.  If you’re truly in a job where they hang on your every word then consider yourself lucky.  The vast majority of us don’t have that luxury so we have to find ways to cope with the fact that everyone doesn’t listen to everything we say. 

And remember, both of these are addictions.  As much as we have to help our users fight against being stupid, we have to constantly fight against becoming too invested in the outcome of our advice.  And I struggle with this with different degrees of success.

 

Admin, Videos

The answer is No

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There are times in a DBA’s life when the answer is No.  And for once I’m not talking about a DBA asking a girl out.  This time I’m talking about requests we get from our users.  I had such a request today.

A manager of another group came up and asked for a generic account that he could use to connect to the DB from an application.  The answer is No.  Sorry dude, but we don’t give out generic account unless it’s absolutely necessary.  And of course, then the insistance sets in that he has to have the generic account because it’s an application.  I said no, the app itself is running under an acct, and I’ll be happy to give that acct the perms.  He said, well it’s not that easy, this is a web app.  And I said well, that changes things significantly, and you’re right it’s not that easy.  He said see, I told you.  I said, it’s even easier.

You see, with a web app you can set the app pool to run under any acct you like, so connecting to a DB under certain credentials is wicked easy.  And it really is.  He said well, we also need to be able to connect using SSMS to be able to run a couple SPs manually.  So we were hoping to be able to use that acct for that as well.  Again, No.  Give me the accts you want to have these perms and I’ll make it happen. 

Now that’s the end of the conversation, but here’s a word for you guys reading this.  There are several ways to make this happen depending on how you layout the group (either in AD or SQL).  The point I’m trying to make here is that sometimes you have to make sure you service your customers in a way that’s best for the company.  They quite often ask for something specific that you can’t give them, but you can give them the equivalent.  Often times users ask for things a certain way because that’s all they know.  They get too caught up in solving a problem so they try to solve the problem the only way they know how… and in this case it was asking for a generic account.  But this is where we as DBAs need to step up and have the courage to guide them.  They may get upset, they may even insist that it be done their way, but they’re not DBAs, and they’re ass isn’t on the line.  It’s our job to make sure that it gets done right.

Now, just for completion here’s a video I did quite some time ago that shows you how to run a website under a specific account.  It’s in IIS 6, but it’ll show you how it’s done, and you should be able to transfer that skill to IIS 7 if you have to.  And if the app has a windows service it’s even easier… just run the service under the account you like and you’re golden.

Admin, Powershell, Time-savers

Comparing DB objects in Powershell

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I got a request today to compare 2 DBs and see if they’ve got all the same tables. It seemed easy enough since I’ve got the redgate Schema Compare tool, but it actually isn’t. See, for some reason Schema Compare doesn’t work very well on my box, and it’s a big overkill for what I needed. All I really needed was to see if the same tables existed. I wasn’t interested in comparing their actual definitions. So I thought I’d give Powershell a try.

I started by picking my cmdlet, which was going to be Compare-Object. I use its alias ‘Diff’. Now, this cmdlet isn’t typically used for comparing DB objects, but there’s nothing that says it can’t be. After giving it a little thought I decided to write the following code to get my comparison. Oh, and I’m just using sample DBs for my examples.

$a = (cd sqlserver:\sql\localhost\default\databases\AdventureWorks\tables).dir;
$b = (cd sqlserver:\sql\localhost\default\databases\AdventureWorksLT\tables).dir;

Diff -reference ($a) -difference ($b) -property name

OK, that’s the base-level syntax you need to do a comparison on table names. That code will give you the following results.

The left arrows indicate tables that are only found in the reference object ($a), while the right arrows indicate objects that are only in the difference object ($b). And that’s really it. The only thing you need to know is that while the differences are outlined, objects that appear in both sets aren’t listed. So your best bet would be to have an empty result set because that would mean that all of the objects exist in both places.

Now, keep in mind also that I only matched on the name property. So there are opportunities for this to go wrong because I’m not taking schema into account. If I wanted to take schema into account though, I would just add it to the property list like this:

$a = (cd sqlserver:\sql\localhost\default\databases\AdventureWorks\tables).dir;
$b = (cd sqlserver:\sql\localhost\default\databases\AdventureWorksLT\tables).dir;

Diff -reference ($a) -difference ($b) -property schema, name

This time you notice that the Address table shows up twice in different schemas. And in the first result set the Address table wasn’t there, so that means that the Address table was considered a match in both DBs because we weren’t taking schema into account.

However, there’s one final piece that you may find useful. What if you want to see all the objects, even the ones that match, you can throw in the -IncludeEqual flag. I’ll run the original Diff to show you that now the Address table shows backup and is indeed considered equal when you compare it just by name.

$a = (cd sqlserver:\sql\localhost\default\databases\AdventureWorks\tables).dir;
$b = (cd sqlserver:\sql\localhost\default\databases\AdventureWorksLT\tables).dir;

Diff -reference ($a) -difference ($b) -property name -IncludeEqual

Now that we’ve got all the plumbing worked out you can apply this to SPs, functions, or whatever you like.
It won’t give you an actual schema compare against these objects, but it’s really helpful in quite a few instances to be able to just see which objects exist.

That’s it for this time.

Admin, Powershell

Finding SQL VMs: Part 2

Ok, I’ve got a couple other methods so I thought I’d pass them along to you guys. These are methods passed to me by users.

The first one is: xp_readerrorlog 0,1,’Manufacturer’
I tried this on a number of my boxes with very mixed results. It didn’t have anything that specifically told me the VM wan’t virtual, and it didn’t work on any of my VMWare boxes. It appeared to work well enough with Hyper-V though.

The 2nd is: Win32_BaseBoard
This WMI class worked just fine for finding Hyper-V instances, but didn’t prove fruitful at all on VMWare. And again, there wasn’t really way way to tell whether it was physical or just not being reported correctly.

So there you have it. We’ve got 2 more methods, that I haven’t had much luck with, but maybe you’ll have more luck if you’ve got the right environment. So if you really don’t like the one I gave you yesterday, then pick one of these.

Admin, Powershell

Is your SQL Server in a VM?

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It seems that one of the key pieces of info you need when looking into performance problems is whether your SQL box is sitting in a VM or not. This could greatly expand the scope of your troubleshooting. The problem is of course, that Windows has no idea it’s in a VM so there’s nothing really to query inside Windows itself to get this info. Oh, if you’re lucky you can run through the software installed and look for the VM tools installed, but that’s really hit or miss, and not as easy as I’d like.

I’ll show you the way I do it though and you can either adopt it or not. Frankly, I’ll be really interested in seeing if anyone leaves a comment with a better way, cause I just stumbled on this about a yr ago so I don’t know how it’s usually done.

Anyway, we’re going to turn to Powershell for the answer… there’s a shock, huh?
Here’s the simple code it takes to query for a VM instance:

gwmi Win32_BIOS -ComputerName "Server1"

That’s pretty easy, right?
Now for the results. I’ve only got 2 VM packages to test with so if you’ve got something other than VMWare or Hyper-V then you’ll have to devise your own test.

For VMWare, the results will look like this:

Notice the SerialNumber has “VMware” in it? That’s what you’re looking for.
Now, to filter out the boxes in your LAN that are VMs, you have but to filter based on that criteria. It would look something like this:

$a = "Server1", "Server2", "Server3"

$a | %{$bios = gwmi Win32_BIOS -ComputerName $_; If($bios.SerialNumber -match "VMware") {"$_ is Virtual"}

Ok, so it’s not a tremendously useful example, but it shows you how the simple filter would work.

Now let’s move on to Hyper-V. That output would look like this:

This time notice that it doesn’t say “Hyper-V”, and it doesn’t even say anything special in the SerialNumber. This time you have to look in the Version col. This col has “VRTUAL” in it. It would be nice if it said Hyper-V, but it doesn’t. So now you can apply the same filter above to find your VMs if you’re in a Hyper-V shop.

$a = "Server1", "Server2", "Server3"

$a | %{$bios = gwmi Win32_BIOS -ComputerName $_; If($bios.SerialNumber -match "VRTUAL") {"$_ is Virtual"}

Now, let’s put them together. If you’re in a mixed shop like I am, you’ll want to know what kind of VM your SQL box is in so you know which VM admin you need to work with when you have problems. So this last script will tell you which VM your boxes are in. Now you can query all of your servers and put that info into a table so you have it always. And don’t forget to run it periodically to make sure nothing’s changed. Because we’re always moving boxes into VMs, and even taking a few back out. So keeping up with the latest can be useful. I run mine once a week.

$a = "Server1", "Server2", "Server3"

$a | %{

$bios = gwmi Win32_BIOS -ComputerName $_; 

if($bios.Version -match "VRTUAL") {"$_ is Hyper-V"}
if($bios.SerialNumber -match "VMware") {"$_ is VMWare"}
if($bios.Version -notmatch "VRTUAL" -and $bios.SerialNumber -notmatch "VMware") {"$_ is Physical"}
		
}

I would loved to have used the SWITCH statement here, but since I’m having to query 2 separate cols it wouldn’t have been the easiest way to do it. However, just in case you get a chance to use it, here’s a quick lesson on SWITCH. It’s like the CASE statement you see in pretty much every language out there. I won’t bother with explaining the details of the syntax because I think it’s fairly self-explanatory. If you do need help though, ping me and I’ll give you a hand, or you could do the responsible thing and bing it on google first.
But here’s a quick example of how you’d use SWITCH.

$a = "hello"

switch ($a)
{
"hello" {"You typed the right word."}
default {"You typed something other than 'hello'."}
}	
}

Again, it’s not a particularly useful example, but it does show you how SWITCH works. It’s really just a CASE statement.

Admin, Time-savers, Videos

Change your process

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This is an excellent example of how you need to be flexible with your processes, even when you’re in the middle of a project.

We started a project to move a DB to a new set of disks. Since the files are large, we probably weren’t going to be able to fit it into a single downtime so we were going to just move one file at a time over the next few weeks until they were all done. Well, due to circumstances out of our control, now they all have to be done at the same time. The problem is that now the file copies are going to take in excess of 6hrs, which is way longer than any downtime they would give us. I know, right? Don’t worry, I’ve got big problems with them forcing us to do operations in a large chunk like this, and then saying we can’t have time to do it. So we were doing our test last week and it did indeed take about 6hrs to copy all the files. And I don’t know why it didn’t hit me before, but why not change the process? The copy process was there because we were going to piecemeal the operation over several weeks, but since that’s gone, then maybe it’s time to come up with a new strategy.

So that’s what I did. My new strategy is an even simpler backup/restore op. All I have to do when I restore is map the files to their new locations and I’m golden. So so far it’s 6hrs to copy, and I know I can backup in 20-25mins. So my restore I’m guessing will be about 30mins (give or take).

Of course, the backup/restore won’t perform that well on its own. You have to tune it so it’ll use the resources to its advantage. This is where knowing how to tune your backups can come into play. And while I often say that tuning backups is quite often frustrating because you can’t use a lot of your resources because you’ve still gotta leave room for user processing on the box, this is one of those times that you can crank it all the way up. Everyone’s going to be offline for this op, so the box is completely mine. I can use every ounce of RAM and CPU on the server if I want. And that’s what I’m going to do. If you’re interested in how to go about tuning your backups, you can look at my recent SQLSAT session on the topic. I did it for SQL #90 in OKC. You can find the vid page for it here: http://midnightdba.itbookworm.com/Events.aspx

So anyway, the point is that just because you’ve come up with a way to do something, don’t set it in stone. If the scope changes in such a way that you can now do it a better way, then don’t be afraid to say “Stop, I’ve got a better way”. You may get some pushback from your peers because the project plan is already done and we need to just move forward with what we’ve got, but that’s when you need to push back and say no, this process was developed for a different circimstance and now it’s a different scenario completely. So this is no longer a viable method.

Admin, Time-savers, Uncategorized

Good practice saves the day

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Ok, a funny thing happened at work today. I had to write a script to move a DB’s files to another drive. Sounds easy enough, huh? Well in theory it was easy, but leave it to me to mess it up. Now, this was just a dry-run so I don’t feel too bad about it, and it gives me a chance to test my process. So, here’s what happened.

My process was this:

1. Run move stmts for all files.
2. Take DB offline.
3. Run PS script that moves the files.

The PS script selects from sys.master_files to get a list of the files to move. Here’s the problem… I’ve already run the move statements so SQL thinks they’re already in the new location. Therefore, the PS script can’t move them from their current location. However, good practice saves the day.

As a habit I always save a copy of sys.master_files to another table in case something happens. Now it’s a simple matter of changing my PS script from selecting from sys.master_files to selecting from sys.master_filesSEAN. Now I’m back in business. That’s the thing I find about good practices; they help you in ways you can’t even predict most of the time.

Here are some other general steps I take to protect against one thing or another:
1. I always try to group like objects in the same schema. It’s just a good idea.
2. I always copy the system DBs when upgrading or patching SQL. Sure I can restore from backup, and I have those too, but if something big happens and I have to completely re-install from scratch it’s much easier to just drop the old system DB files out there than it is to restore from backup.
3. Whenever I’m done working on an important prod system and it’s time to move on to something else, I always close all prod windows and even disconnect from it in object explorer. I don’t want any chance there’s a way to open a new connection to it and do something dumb.

I’d love to give you guys a huge list, and I know there are more, I just can’t think of any right this second.

Admin, Time-savers

An interesting log truncation case

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Here’s a good one for you guys. I got a call from one of my DBAs today that they’re having trouble with the logs on one server not truncating. They’ve brought the server space to a critical level, and it needs to be fixed. The problem is that the DBA had looked at the log backups and they were fine. The log backup job was running just fine, and there were no active transactions.

I asked if there were any DBs being replicated… no.
OK, I’ll look into it.

So I connect and start my investigation where I always do for log truncation problems.
SELECT name, log_reuse_wait_desc from sys.databases

This tells me exactly what the log is waiting for before it can truncate. It’s really a matter what what your goal is. Some people love the troubleshooting process so much that they want to drag it out as long as they can. So they hunt around looking at different things to try to find what the problem is. They gather evidence and try different things until the problem is solved. I’m not that way though. I want to find the issue ASAP and get on to other things. So if you really enjoy the hunt then keep doing what you’re doing. But if you want to solve the problem quickly, then use the above query and get on with your life.

So anyway, the log was waiting on a log backup. I then checked the log backup job and it had been running just fine all day. So ok, the log is being backed up, but SQL still thinks that it’s waiting on a log backup before it can truncate the log.

This is where a knowledge of SQL can come in. At this point there are only 2 things that could architect this situation. Because all the DBs on the server are in the same boat with their logs filling up. So either the backup isn’t actually running, or it’s running with the copy_only flag.

A quick look at the job properties told me exactly what I needed to know. Looking at the execution time of the different runs, the job finishes in about 10secs. That seems a little fast for me on a server that has like 200 DBs on it. So looking back at the history 2 days ago the job was taking 9mins.

At this point, I knew exactly what the problem was. I looked in the SP that runs the backup, and the line that actually runs the backup had been commented out. Someone was trying to make a simple change and commented out the wrong line in the SP.

Look, I’m not smarter than your average DBA, and I’m not necessarily better educated. What I do however, is follow a predictable pattern of troubleshooting, and actually pay attention to the evidence. Sometimes the evidence isn’t clear and you have to make guesses, but most of the time it is.
I understand that the thrill of the hunt keeps you going, but some things are easy enough that you should just get them done. Why a log won’t truncate is such an easy thing to diagnose it should just be commonplace for you. Search somewhere else for your troubleshooting fix.

Admin, Development, Time-savers

Partitioning and the free lunch

Quite often there’s no benefit to a feature if you’re not using it, but this time that’s not the case. Even if you’re not using partitioning you can still take advantage of it in a really cool way.

Let’s say you’ve got a table that you load every night, and you want to move the current data to a new table and truncate the current one. Here’s how you’d do something like that today.

1. Select * into T2 from T1
2. Insert into T2 select * from T1
3. Rename T1 to T2. Then recreate T1.

But let’s face it, none of those choices are really ideal as they take time. Though of those I would choose 1, 3, 2 in order. I don’t like renaming objects because the new object now has a new ID, and it’s hard to track them over time if they keep changing IDs. So those are your choices if you’re not taking advantage of partitioning.

If you ARE taking advantage of partitioning however, you’ve got a different choice. Now you can switch the data out of the current table and into the 2nd w/o any data actually moving at all. And the best part is that you don’t even have to have partitioned your tables at all. That’s right… your tables are automatically partitioned as a single-partition table so you’re using partitioning whether you know it or not. So that means that in order to truncate T1 and move its data to T2 you only have to do this:

alter table T1
switch partition 1 to T2

Now there are some caveats, but as with most things it’s not too bad. The biggest 3 are:
1. The table structures have to be identical.
2. They have to be on the same filegroup. So the partition you’re switching out and the one you’re switching it into have to be on the same filegroup.
3. The target table/partition has to be empty.

There are some others that are advised, but those 3 are the only show STOPPERS. And once you’ve got the data into the new table, you can then move it to a new filegroup, or do whatever with it you like.

So anyway, it’s a wicked cool method for getting rid of your current data even though you’re not officially partitioning your table.

Admin, Powershell, Time-savers

Learning Powershell in Steps

4 Comments

One of the places PS shines is in its ability to let you work the way you want. So often I find someone stagnating in PS because they can’t figure out with “proper” way to do the task. So they stare at the screen for along time, try a few things, and finally give up. The problem with that is that all of a sudden PS is this new thing they don’t understand and they don’t have time to learn it nuances well enough to make it useful. So they get discouraged and don’t even consider it when coming up with solutions to issues. And this is coupled with that fact that sooooooo much of the PS examples out there are by guys who just don’t get it. They post these really long scripts that are written in native SMO when a simple 1-liner will do. Why would you do that to someone? I’ve said many times that if those scripts had been my first intro to PS I wouldn’t have given it a second glance either. To me, these guys can definitely code, but they really don’t *get* what PS is all about.

So here I’m going to help you with what I’m calling the conduit method of learning PS. Because even now when I can’t figure out how to do something in “proper” PS, I still fallback on what I know. I’ve said many times in my SQLSaturday sessions that PS will do pretty much whatever you tell it, and that it’s perfectly compatible with regular DOS commands. And the same thing goes with T-SQL.

Yesterday I needed to take a user account and add it to every DB on a big server. This server had hundreds of DBs on it. Well, of course I went to PS. My goal was to perform the task as fast as I could and go on about my day, so I chose the conduit method instead of the native PS method. Sure, I can call the regular SMO methods and maybe even figure out how that’s done, and figure out the exact params the methods take, etc, but SMO is so poorly documented it’s hard to ferret some of that stuff out. And you know what? Sometimes it’s more important to just get the job done than it is to make sure it’s done in “proper” or native PS.

So what is this conduit method I’m talking about? Well, it’s marrying what you know in T-SQL and using PS only as a conduit for your T-SQL. This usually consists of using Invoke-SqlCmd inside a loop. This way you get the best of both worlds. You get the power of PS and the simplicity of what you already know and you don’t have to rewrite it every time. So again, the conduit method let’s you code in T-SQL, and just delivers it in PS. And it’s a very powerful technique.

OK, so adding a user account to all my DBs. Here’s what the script looked like:

dir | %{invoke-sqlcmd -ServerInstance localhost -database $_ -query "CREATE USER [MyUser] FOR LOGIN [MyUser]"}

So I start at the DB tree in PS. If you run a ‘dir’ command you’ll get a list of DBs. Now, you loop through them, and for each one, you call invoke-sqlcmd and connect to that DB. Now you run the T-SQL inside the -query param. It’s that easy. Now you’ve got a repeatable method for running code against a whole list of DBs on any server and it’ll run whatever is in the -query param.

And if you’ve got code that’s more complicated, you can put it in a file and run it that way. It would look like this:

dir | %{invoke-sqlcmd -ServerInstance localhost -database $_ -InputFile c:\MySQLFile.sql}

With this you can deploy SPs or views, or tables, or whatever you like to every DB. And you can easily alter it to loop across servers too. So even if you’re a beginner you can use this method because it never changes and you can still get the full power out of PS. And this is the point isn’t it?

So many big PS guys completely miss the point that PS is supposed to make our lives easier. They insist that things have to be done a certain way and frankly I’m getting tired of all the little pissing contests that take place. Oh you have to do it this way because it performs better. Or you have to do it this way because it’s more elegant. And while I agree with those to a certain degree, there’s nothing more elegant than getting the job done and not having to spend all day doing it. I’ve had arguments with guys about scripting DB objects and they insist that the native SMO is faster than the way I do it even though mine is a lot less code. And I’ve tested it, and native SMO is faster. On one of my DBs that had several thousand objects the SMO came in like 15secs sooner than the shorter way. Wow, 15secs, really? What will I do with all that extra time? Maybe I can use it to finally write that book I’ve been planning on huh? So for most cases, these differences are just pissing contests that I have no use for.I don’t care if scripting an entire DB takes a few extra secs. I’ll spend far more time than that writing the SMO it takes to save that time.

And since a lot of our work is adhoc in nature, it helps us to be able to write short, tight code. And by adhoc I mean they’re requests that we couldn’t have forseen so we have to write something from scratch. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my hands in raw SMO 4x a day. I’d rather write a few 1-liners and go to lunch.

So don’t let anyone tell you that the conduit method is worthless or even inferior. It’s just as valid a method as writing 2 pages of SMO to do the same thing, and it performs plenty fast enough. Don’t be afraid of PS. Use the conduit method until you can learn more PS and in the meantime you’ll be more productive than you’ve ever been.

And we’ve got lots of PS vids on MidnightDBA.com, so go check them out and we’ll explain all kinds of things to you.