PowerShell Tool Time: Our First Toolbox (SQLServerCentral 9/1/2017)

[SQLServerCentral - www.sqlservercentral.com]( A community of more than 1,600,000 database professionals and growing Featured Contents - [PowerShell Tool Time: Our First Toolbox]( - [What is the biggest mistake you made in production?]( - [Learning designed for the data professional]( - [SQL Puzzle 3: Knights and Queens]( (From the SQLServerCentral Blogs) - [Azure SQL Database – Scaling up]( (From the SQLServerCentral Blogs) The Voice of the DBA Improving Log Shipping I have depended on log shipping for a lot of my career. Often I've found the most common disaster is some user wrecks a lot of data. They drop or delete a table, they change all values to some scalar, or perform some similar problematic update. In those cases, it's often that a restore of some sort is needed, but we don't want to overwrite all the other data in the table. While there are complexities in how you actually work with log shipping, pause it, recover data, and restart it, the basic idea is very simple. It's an extension of basic backup and restore, something all of us (should) be comfortable with. Perhaps that's why it's been something that homegrown scripts handled for many years. In recent versions, Microsoft has added better tooling around log shipping, and there's [a good piece]( on the useful ways log shipping helps DBAs, along with a feature request. The request is for the direct seeding of log shipping, similar to how Availability Groups can be created. While I'm not sure I love this idea, in today's world of high bandwidth, perhaps this isn't a bad idea. For me, I think log shipping is a simple feature, but one that certainly could benefit from some ergonomic tooling that might help us better allow clients to discover our secondary databases, or ease the process of recovering data from them and returning it to the primary. I'd like better statistics to help administrators understand the rate of data transfer, easily learning if there are potential issues with our configuration. Perhaps there are other features you'd like. Maybe you'd want some better filegroup restore capabilities added, allowing you to update some data, while other data is always available on the secondaries. Put on your thinking cap, brainstorm away and give us your ideas in the discussion below. Steve Jones from [SQLServerCentral.com]( Join the debate, and [respond to today's editorial on the forums]( ADVERTISEMENT [PASS 2017](- Learning designed for the data professional PASS Summit offers five educationally-packed days lead by highly-rated, experienced speakers and sessions focused on the way you work with data. Speaker highlights include Bob Ward, and Sunil Agarwal from the Microsoft Tiger Team. Join us Oct 31 to Nov 3. 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[Try it free]( Featured Contents  [] [PowerShell Tool Time: Our First Toolbox]( Mike Fal from [SQLServerCentral.com]() Learn how to begin assembling your functions and code into modules you can easily call from any session.[More »](Tool+Time/132606/) ---------------------------------------------------------------  [] [What is the biggest mistake you made in production?]( Additional Articles from [Brent Ozar Unlimited Blog]( When you have sysadmin access, you are bound to make a big mistake in production at some point in your career - in this post Tara Kizer looks back at what hers were.[More »]( ---------------------------------------------------------------  [] [Learning designed for the data professional]( - PASS Summit offers five educationally-packed days lead by highly-rated, experienced speakers and sessions focused on the way you work with data. Speaker highlights include Bob Ward, and Sunil Agarwal from the Microsoft Tiger Team. Join us Oct 31 to Nov 3. Go to www.PASSsummit.com.[More »]( ---------------------------------------------------------------  [] From the SQLServerCentral Blogs - [SQL Puzzle 3: Knights and Queens]( matthew.mcgiffen 73574 from [SQLServerCentral Blogs]( I thought I’d do another chess puzzle this month. This one is a variant on the Eight Queens problem: SQL Puzzle...[More »]( ---------------------------------------------------------------  [] From the SQLServerCentral Blogs - [Azure SQL Database – Scaling up]( Arun Sirpal from [SQLServerCentral Blogs]( Scaling up and down your SQL Database is something that is quite common to do. I want to discuss the...[More »]( Question of the Day Today's Question (by Steve Jones): What is a Table Valued Constructor? Think you know the answer? [Click here](, and find out if you are right. --------------------------------------------------------------- We keep track of your score to give you bragging rights against your peers. This question is worth 1 point in this category: Table Value Constructor. We'd love to give you credit for your own question and answer. To submit a QOTD, simply log in to the [Contribution Center](. ADVERTISEMENT [Expert Scripting and Automation for SQL Server DBAs]( Automate your workload and manage more databases and instances with greater ease and efficiency by combining metadata-driven automation with powerful tools like PowerShell and SQL Server Agent. Automate your new instance-builds and use monitoring to drive ongoing automation, with the help of an inventory database and a management data warehouse. [Get your copy from Amazon today](. Yesterday's Question of the Day Yesterday's Question (by Steve Jones): When a query is processed logically, which clause is handled first? Answer: FROM Explanation: The logical order of query processing is: - FROM - ON - JOIN - WHERE - GROUP BY - WITH CUBE or WITH ROLLUP - HAVING - SELECT - DISTINCT - ORDER BY - TOP Ref: SELECT - [click here]( --------------------------------------------------------------- [» Discuss this question and answer on the forums]( Database Pros Who Need Your Help Here's a few of the new posts today on the forums. To see more, [visit the forums](. --------------------------------------------------------------- [SQL Server 2016]( : [SQL Server 2016 - Administration]( [copying a database from one server instance to another server instance]( - I am trying to copy a database from one server instance to another server instance. 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I'm trying not to be a help vampire ;-)  pdwyer/e/eoc/help_vampire.htm I've read --------------------------------------------------------------- [SQL Server 7,2000]( : [Replication]( [Cleaning up Replication Monitor]( - I have sucessfully removed an old publication and it subscriptions, but I am still seeing references to it in the... This email has been sent to {EMAIL}. To be removed from this list, please click [here.]( If you have any problems leaving the list, please contact the webmaster@sqlservercentral.com. --------------------------------------------------------------- This newsletter was sent to you because you signed up at [SQLServerCentral.com](. Feel free to forward this to any colleagues that you think might be interested. 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