PowerShell

Open Source PowerShell is available on several operating systems, that really what’s special about the whole project! To get PowerShell to function on these various systems we need to build (compile) the software in that environment. This is what will produce the actual executable program that is powershell.

To facilitate the build process the PowerShell team has documented how to do this for the currently available platforms, Linux, MacOS and Windows. In this post I want to talk about why this is important, point you to the resources available online to help you build Open Source PowerShell and tell you my experiences building PowerShell on the Windows, macOS and Linux!

Open Source PowerShell has been on fire, getting tons of community support and really making people think about what’s to come with a single language to manage a heterogenous data center.

To highlight this point, in my recent Pluralsight Play By Play Microsoft Open Source PowerShell on Linux and Mac with Jason Helmick and Jeffrey Snover I did a demo on using PowerShell remoting where I connected from a Linux machine to three other machines and retrieved lists of top processes from each…two Linux and one Windows. I used one script to accomplish this and no passwords. A simple implementation highlighting a very big idea. After, some people have asked…how did I do this without passwords?

What’s going on here?

So last week you may have seen this picture on Twitter…it went a little crazy…and you may have been wondering what are we up to? Well, last week I had the pleasure of filming a Pluralsight Play By Play. A Play By Play is a course on Pluralsight but in a slightly different format than you may be used to. A Play By Play bring together industry experts to discuss and demonstrate an emerging technology. This Play by Play is on “Microsoft Open Source PowerShell – PowerShell on Linux and Mac” and is available now and is FREE! You do not have to be a subscriber!

In this post we’re going set PowerShell as your default Linux shell.

What is a shell?

In Linux systems you’re given options, tons of options, you can set, reconfigure, add/remove almost anything that you want. And one of those options is your shell. The shell is the thing that you interact with when you’re typing commands at the command line. Different shells have different behaviors and characteristics. It’s a very personal choice. For ages I’ve been a fan of bash.

Getting PowerShell on Linux

Well it’s not just an announcement, you can actually get PowerShell on Linux and MacOS right now from GitHub – here!

Installing PowerShell

Once you’ve downloaded an installation file you can use RPM or apt to install the package. If you’re on a Mac…well just double click on the package!

yum install powershell-6.0.0_alpha.9-1.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm

If you’re on Ubuntu, you’ll need a little more stuff read <a href="https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/master/docs/installation/linux.md#ubuntu-1404">this</a>.

Running PowerShell

We’ll there’s really not much to that, just type **powershell** at the command prompt an you’re off and running!

In this post we are going to show the implementation of a PowerShell script using SMO to move data between filegroups on SQL Server. This article is the second of our two part series on “Moving SQL Server data between filegroups – Database Structures”, you can find the first article here.

The Challenge

Looking around on the web, I couldn’t find a solution to the problem of moving data between filegroups that I liked. Further, many of those solutions are T-SQL based, which I thought were very complex. So I went off to write it myself. The problem lends itself to an iterative solution and I felt that T-SQL was not the right tool for the job. Enter PowerShell, which give us the ability to easily iterate over sets of data with minimal code, couple that with the SQL Server Management Object model and we have the makings of an elegant solution.