Powershell Links – 2010-03-06

Here are some of the more interesting Powershell links I came across recently, along with some thoughts about them.

Powershell, String Encryption, and GPG – SQLServerCentral.com brought this one to my attention. Chad Miller discusses working with Oracle through Powershell, and the subject of encrypting the connection strings came up. There are times that we need to connect using something other than Windows authentication. Storing an encrypted connection string makes a lot of sense in those cases. I don’t normally work with Oracle, but the idea of passing and saving encrypted connection strings makes a lot of sense. I do a lot of work against SQL Servers that require SQL Logins so plan to investigate this more thoroughly in the near future.

Powershell Cheatsheet – If you don’t follow the #Powershell hashtag on Twitter, you may have missed out on this useful set of Powershell tips and tricks, including a way to set your current location to a UNC path. This is cool because it’s something you cannot do with a standard command prompt without mapping a drive. There are other tips here that make this well worth bookmarking if you are getting started with Powershell.

The T-SQL Hammer – This is taken from Chad Miller’s blog, but is a great reminder that just because your typical DBA knows T-SQL and thinks in T-SQL does not make that the best solution for everything. If you’re wondering why a DBA might want to learn Powershell, give this a read.

Powershell Help Brower – This script uses Primal Forms and Powershell to build a Treeview Help browser for Powershell. I tested this out and the only entry that seemed to give me fits was trying to get help for Get-ChildItem. That constantly threw an error for me. However, the rest was very nice – an easy way to browse the available commands and see the help for them.

As with anything else you find on the Internet, don’t just copy these scripts and run them. Check them out carefully and be sure you know what’s going to happen. (Someday I’m just gonna copy Buck Woody’s disclaimer for scripts and give attribution. 🙂  )