PowerShell

Many UNIX people will probably say "boring" when they see PowerShell. UNIX has always supported great flexibility in scripting, of course they did not have a great GUI like Windows does. But as server management is getting more and more complex because of the large environments and many flavors of server software it was time to start thinking without the GUI because it does tend to work a bit slower as compared to a script enabled server and some things are just impossible using only a GUI. With scripts you can check for certain conditions and take actions automatically and appropriately based on these conditions.

The answer to this is PowerShell, a command line shell and scripting environment which will enable you to manage almost everything. One of its most powerful features is the ability to extend it with .NET components as well as being able to use the out of the box .NET Framework objects.

For Exchange 2007 they have first written the PowerShell layer and based the GUI entirely on these scripts. The GUI will also support a Script This Action (sound like we were ahead in SQL Server) which will create the PowerShell script for you.

At the customer we have something we call DCS (Data Conversion Scripts), basically it means going from one version of the database to the next version. We had a great .NET console application combined with some batch files which does this for us. Although this worked great we felt this was getting too complex to manage because we do parallel development and support different version at the same time. A new system was required using a simpler concept which my colleague killspid had proven was possible.

We started out with a batch file which used sql scripts with SQLCMD to perform the DCS task. Although this worked fine the lead DBA had a new requirement which needed more logic and was hard to do in a batch file or T-SQL. We decided to rewrite the DCS in PowerShell and I am very glad we did. Using a PowerShell script, SQLCMD and an XML config file we now support all the requirements and we have much more control than we did in the previous versions. The support for variables in SQLCMD has also proven itself very useful so do not underestimate the power of SQLCMD either.

I must admit the syntax and way of working is a bit peculiar at first because you have to lose the .NET mindset and get into the scripting mindset. If you are used to creating administrative scripts you will probably have less of a problem.

Tip: if you want to get rid of the output SQLCMD gives you in PowerShell add >$null behind it.
eg. sqlcmd -SmyServer -dmyDatabase -E -b > $null