Jeff, your question (if I can boil it down) is "Why should I use Powershell (if I can do it in T-SQL)?" is THE most common question I get around...

I absolutely recommend the ISE. The basic shell is functional, but the ISE provides a better experience in general for working on scripts. I use it all the time, though...

Stay tuned for other articles, we'll go over how you can manage these and run them remotely or deploy them to different sites.

And you won't use xp_cmdshell to either manage...

Thanks for the feedback. To answer both of your questions, there are a few ways to allow functions to be easily called. I will be covering them in upcoming articles,...