Over the last 9 weeks I took you on a journey of skills and career topics related to being a SQL Server DBA. We looked at the Production DBA. We saw skills and career topics from the beginning to mid-career to Senior DBA. Then we looked at the Development DBA and their skills and career development needs. Finally there was a wrap up post.
To make it easier for everyone to get to these posts, I decided to bring them all together on a single page.
We’ve covered a lot of ground for Production and Development DBAs in terms of the skills and applicable career topics. We’ve mentioned necessary skills with T-SQL, backup/restore, automation, PowerShell, troubleshooting, SSIS, SSRS, patching, Query Store, HA/DR, leadership and emotional intelligence. That’s quite a list! However, looking back at the series, there are still a number of things that weren’t mentioned.
Hello dear reader! This is the third post in a series to help you get started automating things with PowerShell. You will be looking at how to start and stop SQL Server using PowerShell as well as setting the Max Server Memory setting, measuring free disk space and more.
This series is just an introduction to PowerShell and basic functionality you might be interested in as a SQL Server Database Administrator or as a System Administrator responsible for SQL Server. Because it is introductory I don’t have examples of long scripts that do a series of complex things as part of these posts. What the series does have are one or two line scripts that are still powerful and help you explore what is available to you in PowerShell.
In Part 1 of this series we began to look at how you can leverage PowerShell as a DBA and there was a brief discussion about automation. Today you will experiment with the DBATools command Copy-DbaLogin and learn about Out-Gridview and the -whatif switch.
Let’s suppose you have one, or more logins you need to get from one SQL instance to another. Perhaps you are setting up a new test environment for SQL Server 2019 and you need to move this login to that environment. Maybe this is one node of a SQL Server AlawaysOn Availability Group and you need to get this login, with its SID, on each node of the AG. Below you see I have a screenshot of a login called mysqltestlogin. It’s on a SQL Server 2017 instance.
What we’re really talking about in this series is automation, specifically by using PowerShell. Now, in simple terms, automation is about removing the human, manual element in doing tasks. Why should you care about that? Automation will provide the following benefits:
With the last post, we began talking about the Development DBA and the skills needed at the beginning of this career path. Now it’s time for you to ponder what the next level looks like.
In years 2 through 4 the Dev DBA will work with more complex T-SQL such as recursive CTE’s, and error handling with TRY CATCH or the THROW syntax will likely be introduced at this stage. You may begin writing database views during this part of your career and leveraging them to make query writing a bit simpler for yourself and others. You are likely to be exposed to T-SQL Triggers and you’ll need to understand them and even maybe write a few triggers of your own.