Announcing the General Availability of IDERA SQL Safe Backup 9.3

Here is another (and very solid) approach to remove leading zeroes from an IP address using a regular expression: '010.012.000.101' -replace '\b0+\B' It looks for one or more "0" following a word boundary (\b) and not followed by a word...

There are two simple tricks to find out your current fully qualified domain name (FQDN). You can either resort to ping.exe: PS> ping -a localhost Or, you can use .NET Framework and ask DNS: PS> [System.Net.DNS]::GetHostByName('').HostName  

If you'd like to find out how long it is until next Sunday (or how many days have passed since last Sunday), simply use the property DayOfWeek. It is a number telling you the current day of the week. So it's easy to calculate the difference between the current...

If you must run an application with a different identity, Start-Process offers the parameter -Credential. This would launch the Notepad editor using the context of user mydomain\myuser: Start-Process -FilePath notepad -Credential mydomain\myuser However, you may run...

SQL Server uses the port 1433 as its standard listening port.  Hackers know this and will use it to more easily hack into your SQL environment.  Because of this, many DBAs will choose to not use the standard SQL port of 1433 for their SQL environment and...

If you need to change and adjust settings in a registered scheduled task, there is a COM interface called 'Schedule.Service' that you can use to access all registered scheduled tasks (Vista/Server 2008 or better). The sample code below accesses the scheduled...

There is an underestimated option to make schtasks.exe dump scheduled tasks as CSV data. PowerShell can grab the CSV data and turn it into objects, creating reports with all scheduled tasks in just one line: schtasks.exe /query /fo csv | ConvertFrom-Csv | Where-Object...

A hash table can store any data type. If you want more control, you can create a typed dictionary (which behaves pretty much like a hash table): $ht = @{} $htTyped = New-Object 'System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary[string,int]' $ht.ID = 12 $ht.Person =...

I’ve heard people say many times that they don’t use full or bulk-logged recovery model or backup the transaction log of their database because they do not care about point-in-time (PiT) restores. However, PiT restores are not the only reason to use...

If you are like me, you hate having to type in the full path to a PowerShell script to run it.Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just execute it? I’m an old Windows scripter guy (DOS, VBScript, etc), and I’m used to being able to just double-click a...

One of my pet peeves is the use of RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE in scripts to change server options. Am I being unreasonable or is this justified? All you need to do is look up the definition of the WITH OVERRIDE option for the RECONFIGURE command in Books Online to see...

By default, SQL Server databases are comprised of two files: the primary data file (or .mdf) and the log file (or .ldf). It is, however, possible to configure SQL Server databases to use additional files – which can be an effective means of increasing SQL Server...