The Ashdar Partners Blog

Lately, I have been trying to up my game a bit and one of the things I am doing is using some of the latest tools and bits of things. (Partly, this is because I have been working with some old technology lately and I am feeling "dated". Ask me about Fox Pro, if you dare.) PowerShell After many years of not seeing value in updating, I am moving to PowerShell 6. (Version 6.2, specifically.) Frankly, more things work than I expected. I haven't seen any performance regressions and things have gone smoothly. I think I spent more time incorporating the PowerShell version into my Prompt function than anything else that I had to do because of the upgrade. SSMS I am running the absolutely-latest build of SSMS. I skipped some SSMS builds when the removed the diagramming functionality. Now that it has been put back into the product, I am on the update train again. Aside: The diagramming feature isn't awesome but it is easy to use, requires no installation, doesn't ...

(Actually, they are up to version 1.0.2 already.) I've been using DbaTools for a number of years. I have come to rely on it more and more. Now, I find it at least as deeply entwined in my PowerShell code as the SqlServer module is. All right-thinking people use DbaTools. And you should, too. More seriously, DbaTools is one of the few PowerShell modules I absolutely rely on, on a daily basis. I use DbaTools so frequently that I can't easily categorize it all. In short, I can: Check servers, instances, databases, disks, security and many other things for issues on a daily basis Check business rules on a daily basis Restore databases to test environments on an ad-hoc basis. I have this working so smoothly that I forget that I have Ola Hallengren's backup scripts actually running the database backups.  Load data into databases Extract data from databases I've never actually used DbaTools for it's original purpose, which was migrating databases and instan...