Book Image

SQL Server 2014 with Powershell v5 Cookbook

By : Donabel Santos
Book Image

SQL Server 2014 with Powershell v5 Cookbook

By: Donabel Santos

Overview of this book

PowerShell can be leveraged when automating and streamlining SQL Server tasks. PowerShell comes with a rich set of cmdlets, and integrates tightly with the .NET framework. Its scripting capabilities are robust and flexible, allowing you to simplify automation and integration across different Microsoft applications and components. The book starts with an introduction to the new features in SQL Server 2014 and PowerShell v5 and the installation of SQL Server. You will learn about basic SQL Server administration tasks and then get to know about some security-related topics such as the authentication mode and assigning permissions. Moving on, you will explore different methods to back up and restore your databases and perform advanced administration tasks such as working with Policies, Filetables, and SQL audits. The next part of the book covers more advanced HADR tasks such as log shipping and data mirroring, and then shows you how to develop your server to work with BLOB, XML, and JSON. Following on from that, you will learn about SQL Server's BI stack, which includes SSRS reports, the SSIS package, and the SSAS cmdlet and database. Snippets not specific to SQL Server will help you perform tasks quickly on SQL servers. Towards the end of the book, you will find some useful information, which includes a PowerShell tutorial for novice users, some commonly-used PowerShell and SQL Server syntax, and a few online resources. Finally, you will create your own SQL Server Sandbox VMs. All these concepts will help you to efficiently manage your administration tasks.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
14
Index

Reading an event log

In this recipe, we will read the event log.

How to do it...

Let's take a look at how we can read the Windows event log from PowerShell:

  1. Open PowerShell ISE as an administrator.
  2. Add the following script and run it:
    Get-EventLog -LogName Application -Newest 20 -EntryType Error

How it works...

Reading the event log is straightforward in PowerShell. We can do this using the Get-EventLog cmdlet. This cmdlet accepts a few switches that includes LogName and EntryType:

Get-EventLog -LogName Application -Newest 20 -EntryType Error

Some of the possible LogName values are follows:

  • Application
  • HardwareEvents
  • Internet Explorer
  • Security
  • System
  • Windows PowerShell

You can alternatively pass the name of a custom log that is available in your system to it.

The EntryType can be of the following types:

  • Error
  • FailureAudit
  • Information
  • SuccessAudit
  • Warning

In this recipe, we also use the –Newest switch to filter only for the newest 20 error events.

An alternative way of using Get-EventLog is Get-WinEvent...