I’ve been wanting to do more with Powershell (PoSh). I’ve seen Allen White present on it for years, and I’ve dabbled in various ways, using it to handle small tasks. However I haven’t really committed to learning a bunch of PoSh.
Last month I was with Grant Fritchey on the 2013 SQL in the City tour and in one of his sessions, he uses some Powershell to audit his SQL Server instance. I thought that was pretty cool, and it made me want to dig in further. At the end of his talk, he mentioned a book, and I decided to grab it.
It’s Learn Windows Powershell 3 in a Month of Lunches from Don Jones. The name alone made me want to grab it, and it has a catchy title.
My plan is to take time every day or two and read a chapter and work through exercises in the book. I really want to get more comfort in PoSh because I do believe in it and I think it’s a fantastic way to get things done. I don’t work at scale, but I suspect with a little practice I’ll be using PoSh more often for simple things and saving those scripts.
I’ll blog along the way and see how things are going. Once I get through, I expect that I’ll be digging into more with other articles and books that deal specifically with SQL Server.
The days in the Challenge:
- Day 1
- Day 2 – Help
- Day 3 – Commands
- Day 4 and 5 – Providers
- Day 6 The Pipeline
- Day 7 Adding Commands
- Day 8 – Objects: data by another name
- Day 9 – The Pipelines, deeper
- Day 10 – Formatting
- Day 11 – Filtering
- Day 12 – A Practical Interlude
- Day 13 – Remote Control
- Day 14 – WMI
- Day 15 – Jobs
- Day 16 – Working with many objects
- Day 17 – Security Alert
- Day 18 – Variables
- Day 19 – I/O
- Day 20 –
Voice of the DBA 
Comments
12 responses to “The Powershell Challenge”
If you move into using Azure, you’ll not survive without it! Certainly worth getting up to scratch if Azure is ever a consideration. I’m not an expert in Powershell, but I know enough to do whatever I want, which has proven very useful.
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Yep, part of my focus here is because of all the Azure demos that seem to require it.
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Azure is definitely one more reason for learning PowerShell. But, the biggest draw for this would be the effort vs. rewards that are attached with learning PoSH. It is like playing Diablo-II in Nightmare mode with GOD hack turned on.
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Powershell is a pretty cool OS lock in. You won’t create a billion dollar service on the Windows platform, but you can do a lot of work much more efficiently this way. My fascination is be able to run the scripts solely using xp_cmdshell.
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Really? I bet there are some billion dollar services on the Windows platform. Years ago Dell was selling $1b/yr on their website, powered by SQL Server and Windows.
I agree that it is a bit of a lock in, but so is .NET. If you’re a Windows shop/person, it’s a valuable tool and because all other tooling is being built on it, learning this is a good way to roll your own tools together.
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I’m meant 1-3 billion dollars of owner equity (Instagram, Snapchat) in months with code and scripts. Windows still runs a ton of devices, and having a tool to reach them efficiently is important. It is just costly to scale.
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I am new in powershell learning, but I am eager to know and dig it.can you please suggest any book that help me to learn from scratch.
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Besides the book I listed in the post? I am using that one.
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I know I’m late to the party, but I bought this book a few months ago (bad timing right before a big move) and I’m going to try to catch up and work through it, too!
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