The very first thing I did at work when I was handed a list of 75 SQL servers that I was responsible for managing was to document EVERYTHING. I made spreadsheets of server names, instance names, version info, OS info, Agent job schedules. The process was very manual and I ended up connecting to each server in SSMS. Then I loaded all the data that I had collected into a SQL database so I could run reports. I quickly realized that it would be almost impossible to keep all the data updated. How would I know if a developer added or deleted a database or an agent job or something else. I now have a series of PowerShell scripts that are scheduled in Task Scheduler to run every day to gather this info for me and update my database. I won't get into the structure of my database now or how it is updated but I will show you some snippets of the scripts I use that actually gather the data.
Note: I am going to be using the SQLPSX modules, so if you don't have them installed please see the last post.
Getting SQL Server Information
The first thing we want to get is information about the SQL Server: version number, SQL edition, and some server level settings. To make our lives easier, we are going to use one of the SQLPSX modules. Like I showed in the last post, we need to import the module before we can use its functions.Import-Module SQLMaint
Next, lets use the SQLPSX function Get-SqlServer to get the information we want. If you are logged in with a Windows account that has permissions to the sql server you don't need any parameters other than the name of the SQL Server (If you don't have permissions you can use the username and password parameters to specify the credentials. Check out get-help for more info).
Get-SQLServer -sqlserver 'Nightwing'
Note: if the instance you are trying to connect to is not a default instance, you need to include the instance name in the sqlserver parameter. For example, I have another instance on the computer Nightwing named Bludhaven
Get-SQLServer -sqlserver 'Nightwing\Bludhaven'
Like most of the other cmdlets and functions, this is going to return more information than you need so lets use the pipe operator to just pull out some important details. If you don't remember the pipe operator, you can read about it in my first post on this subject
get-sqlserver -sqlserver 'Nightwing' |Select-Object Version, Edition, Platform, LoginMode, ServiceAccount
Here is the result:
Using a basic code structure you could wrap a loop around that command to iterate through a list of servers and get the same information from each of them. You could take the output of that information and store it in an Excel sheet or a database. Here is a basic script to iterate through a list of servers stored in a variable.
$mysqlserver = ('Nightwing','Nightwing\bludhaven')
$mysqlserver | foreach {
$_
get-SQLServer -sqlserver $_ | select-object Version, edition |Format-Table
}
Here is the result:
I feel I need to explain the script for those of you who do not have much programming experience. The first line
$mysqlserver = ('Nightwing','Nightwing\bludhaven')
declares a variable named $mysqlserver and assigns it an array with two strings. The second line
$mysqlserver | foreach {
takes that array and pipes it to the foreach command, creating a loop that executes once for each item in the array. The next line
$_
prints out the literal string value from the array that was passed to it (in the first loop it is the string 'Nightwing'. In Powershell $_ is the reserved variable for the current value in the pipe. For more information on variables you can read this article at PowerShellPro.com . The fourth line
get-SQLServer -sqlserver $_ | select-object Version, edition |Format-Table
gets two items of SQL Server Information for the server name that is stored in the $_ variable and then outputs it in table format. The last line
}
closes the foreach loop causing it to move on to the next string stored in the array.
Getting OS Information
It would also be good to get some information about the Windows server that SQL Server resides on. For this we aren't going to use the SQLPSX modules but instead use the WMI capabilities of PowerShell. Getting information using WMI is built in to PowerShell, so we don't need to import any modules, instead we use the Get-WMIObject cmdlet. To use this cmdlet we are going to need two parameters: the name of the WMI class and the name of the server (Again this assumes you have the proper permissions with your current Windows login to get this information).get-wmiobject -class 'win32_operatingsystem' -ComputerName 'nightwing'
This returns:
Wait a minute!! That isn't much info at all. Here is a trick with some PowerShell cmdlets, they don't show you all the possible info by default. If you want to see all the data returned you can pipe the output to Select-Object *
get-wmiobject -class 'win32_operatingsystem' -ComputerName 'nightwing' |select-object *
Run this on your own system to see everything you can get back. Just like we did with the get-sqlserver cmdlet we can wrap a loop around this to iterate through a list of servers.
Getting Database Information
Now that we have gathered some information about the SQL Server Instance Level and the OS that it resides on, let's take a look at how to get information on the databases that reside on the server. For this we are going to be using SQLPSX again so we will need to import the module.Import-Module SQLMaint
Next we are going to use the Get-SQLDatabase function from the SQLPSX modules. In this example I am just going to be pulling the name of the database, you will see why later.
Get-SqlDatabase -sqlserver 'nightwing' |select-object name
Result:
Do you notice a problem here? Those are just the user databases, we are not getting any info on the system databases. Let's try a different cmdlet: Get-SqlSysDatabases.
Get-SqlSysDatabases -sqlserver 'nightwing'
Result:
Now we see them all, but we aren't getting much information by default. I know what you are thinking, pipe the result into select-object * to get the rest of the data. Give it a shot, I'll wait here.
Get-SqlSysDatabases -sqlserver 'nightwing' | select-object *
Did you try it? Not much extra info is there.
Now try the same thing with the Get-SqlDatabase command. Again, I'll wait.
Get-SqlDatabase -sqlserver 'nightwing' |select-object *
Did you see all the info you got that time! Pretty cool. Now if only there was a way to combine the two commands so you could get all the information on all the databases. We can do it by using a pipe. The trick is that first we have to store the data in an array and use a loop for each database.
$mydatabases = Get-SqlsysDatabases -sqlserver nightwing
$mydatabases | foreach {
$mydb = $_.name
Get-SqlDatabase -sqlserver nightwing -dbname $mydb
}
Like the last loop we did we are creating an array, only this time instead of an array of strings we are creating an array of objects. Each element of the array contains the entire list of properties for a database and there are as many elements as there are databases. This might be confusing to those not familiar with Object Oriented Programming but just remember that you don't have to understand it completely to be able to use it. After we create our $mydatabases array variable
$mydatabases = Get-SqlsysDatabases -sqlserver nightwing
we pipe it into a for each loop that will execute once for each database.
$mydatabases | foreach {
Next we create a local variable and assign it the name property of our object (think of it like when we did the Select-Object name before).
$mydb = $_.name
Now that we have the database name stored in a variable, we can pass it as an optional parameter to the Get-SqlDatabase command to get information just about that database.
Get-SqlDatabase -sqlserver nightwing -dbname $mydb
Then we close the loop so it can start over for the next database in our list.
}
Lets format the script so it just pulls out a few choice tidbits of information on each database
$mydatabases = Get-SqlsysDatabases -sqlserver nightwing
$mydatabases | foreach {
$mydb = $_.name
Get-SqlDatabase -sqlserver nightwing -dbname $mydb |
select-object Name,Createdate,lastbackupdate,size,dataspaceusage
}
Go ahead and take a look at all the properties that this function returns to see the wealth of information that PowerShell puts right at your fingertips.
Links and References
Download SQLPSX from CodeplexVariables Arrays and Hashes from PowerShellPro.com
Technet article on PowerShell and WMI
Sum Up
Once again I ended up writing way more that I thought I would. Hopefully you stuck with it and got all the way down here. I probably could have split this into three posts and gone a bit more in depth with each section but I am eager to move forward to show you how to use all of this information to help make your job as a DBA easier. Next week I am going to get into using PowerShell to do the basics of t-sql: Select, Insert and Update. See you then!Hasta Luego,
RutherfordTX
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