Working with EPPlus and PowerShell


I recently worked on a requirement, where the end user wanted to convert Excel files into tab-delimited text files. In my head I was like, this is easy: “PowerShell FTW! Yay!”. The reason for the excitement was because we already have two repositories that I know work well with Excel and fit my requirement.
◾Doug Finke’s – ImportExcel module.
◾Warren F’s – PSExcel module

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Posted in PowerShell

Connecting to SAP HANA from PowerShell


Connecting to SAP HANA using #PowerShell. We will discuss a simple example scenario and will be getting backup details.

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2015 in review


The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 5,700 times in 2015. If it were a NYC subway

Posted in Fun-Stuff

Retrieve your blog posts from WordPress using REST API


If you own a wordpress blog and are curious as to how many posts you blogged with a particular tag, the Invoke-RestMethod is here to help you.

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Posted in Fun-Stuff, PowerShell

Windows Azure setup for using with PowerShell


In this post we will see how you can create a logical server and database instance on Windows Azure SQL Database and connect to the database using PowerShell.

First things first, we need a Windows Azure subscription. Presently, you can register for a free trail at http://www.windowsazure.com.

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T-SQL Tuesday #050: Automation, lessons learnt


The topic for the golden jubilee edition is, “Automation”. What is T-SQL Tuesday? T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different blogger each month. This blog party was started by Adam Machanic (blog|twitter). You can take part

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Posted in SQL Server

T-SQL Tuesday #050: Automation, how much of it is the same?


Automation plays a huge part in our lives and the DBA profession is no so different. A couple of years ago this topic was shared by Pat Wright. I would like to revisit this again and see how much of our approach has changed.

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Posted in SQL Server

2013 in review


The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 7,100 times in 2013. If it were a NYC subway

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T-SQL Tuesday #46: You did what? Creative hacks to common problems


This whole thing, was put in a store procedure and then called from a job step for a long running job. For example, like a database backup job. And additional logic was written around the return value to write proper error numbers to application log. These event-ids where then picked up by monitoring applications and alerts where raised.

I have mixed feelings about this solution. Although, it worked without a problem (I am secretly proud that I was able to write something like this); I would have loved to just upgrade the servers to SQL 2008 and be done with it.

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Posted in SQL Server

Using verbal expressions to make regex easy in PowerShell


What it means is that, we write ‘Four times X plus 3 equals seven’, and get ‘4x+3=7′. That example, could be a little misleading so let try it again, a valid url would consist of http at the begining of the line, maybe s if you are accessing a secure site, then it will have ://, maybe www. if you are so inclined to type and anything but a space. The aim of verbal expressions is to let you type the above and get a regular expression that matches a URL which is this: this:’^(?:http)(?:s)?(?:://)(?:www.)?(?:[^\ ])$’

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Posted in Fun-Stuff, PowerShell