Microsoft gave to me, an excellent new management language. Yeah, so it doesn’t rhyme or match the song in any way, but as far as gifts of the season go, PowerShell is it. There are a couple of problems with PowerShell, first, it’s not installed everywhere, and second, DBAs just haven’t quite latched on to this new language as a management tool.

That second problem is absolutely not one that I would say about Aaron Nelson (blog|twitter), our next 12 Days of SQL blogger.  Aaron is one of the leading lights out there educating DBAs, and everyone else for that matter, about the strengths and capabilities of PowerShell as a management language for SQL Server. I’ve said it twice, and I hope you noticed, but I didn’t say scripting language, because PowerShell isn’t. It’s a management language. It’s a way to automate the management of your servers and that’s what Aaron’s work is all about. He blogs and tweets and presents quite a lot about PowerShell. If you’re trying to learn this excellent tool, you should be reading his stuff.

In particular, the post that has me the most excited, out of all the work that Aaron has done this year, is this excellent explanation of remoting with PowerShell. Why this post in particular? Because remoting, combined with asynchronous calls means you can send a PowerShell script to any or all servers in your environment, at the same time. It means you can perform serious, enterprise level management tasks in an automated and repeatable fashion and you can do it to all your servers at the same time, easily. Yeah, I said easily. That’s because it is easy. Read Aaron’s excellent explanation and you’ll agree. Once you understand how to call all your servers remotely, it’s even easier to then pass them a script, call a stored proc, send a DBCC command, or just about anything else. This is why I call PowerShell a management language, because we’re not talking about scripting here, we’re talking about managing your servers, and that’s exciting.

On the 3rd Day of SQL, Microsoft gave to me, 3 excited screams… Sorry, but you’ll have to wait until Monday for the next installment, but the wait, I assure you, will be worth it. That’s because David Stein (blog|twitter) will be shouting a post in your direction that will absolutely be something you want to hear (and you’ll hear it, loud & clear). Now, I’m teasing Dave, and you can ask him why, but I mean it in good fun. David’s a FreeCon alumn, a nice guy, and a talented individual. If you’re not checking his stuff regularly, you really should be.