TSQL2sday #94 – daily database copy using Powershell – dbatools

T-SQL Tuesday is a recurring blog party, that is started by Adam Machanic (b | t). Each month a blog will host the party, and everyone that want’s to can write a blog about a specific subject.

This month Rob Sewell is our TSQL2sDay host and his subject is “Let’s get all Posh!”.

As I had written in a former post I was inspired by Andre Kamann to start using Powershell to manage our SQL Server environments, since this year I’m a major contributor of dbatools – a multifunctional Powershell module for DBAs.

I use the functions from the dbatools module day by day more and more. And I try to write about some of those tasks here in my blog like this post 😉

So one of me ServiceManager asked me to write a job which should refresh the test-environment each day – only 3 databases (out of 12). So I just wrote a Powershell-script which copies those databases from production to test environment.

First, we start with the requirements:

• Currently approx. 280 GB
• Backup with Copy only
• Creation of database duplication as an automatic job
• Every morning at 4:00

My first thoughts about that were creating a SQL Server Agent Job with following steps:

1. check the availability of Shared-Destination-Folder
2. delete/clear Destination-Folder-Content
3. Shrink all Transaction-Logfiles
4. Backup all Databases from given list
5. Restore each Backup-File from folder
6. Check all orphaned user
7. delete/clear Destination-Folder-Content

A year or two ago, I had built this with a lot of normal T-SQL-Agent-Jobs, now I’m doing this with dbatools which make it very easy and fast (and in one step)

I’m building such scripts in a very simple way, in order to make it easy to understand what a script is doing… so I’m not using any complex one-liner 😉
This time I need a job log and dbatools, so I started with importing those functionalities

. E:\SQL_Admin_Skripte\Function-Write-Log.ps1

$Network_Transfer_Folder = '\\DestinationShare\Backup'
$Local_Transfer_Folder = 'E:\BackupPath\'


if (-not  (Get-Module -Name dbatools)) {
    Import-Module E:\SQL_Admin_Skripte\dbatools-master\dbatools.psd1
}

Claudio Silva (b | t) helped me a little with the following „SHRINK“-command which was in a first stage a normal combination of Powershell „Invoke-Sqlcmd“ and T-SQL, now it is a dbatools-function called „Invoke-DbaDatabaseShrink“ which is a little bit tricky if you only want to shrink log files… but it works.

#Shrink TLogs
Invoke-DbaDatabaseShrink -SqlInstance Src-InstanceName -Database DB1,DB2,DB3 -LogsOnly -ShrinkMethod TruncateOnly

Now I had just to make a Backup and restore those Backups on the destination instance… no real magic 😉

#Backup named databases
Backup-DbaDatabase -SqlInstance Src-InstanceName -Databases DB1,DB2,DB3 -Type Full -FileCount 32 -CopyOnly -BackupDirectory $Network_Transfer_Folder

#Restore all databases in given folder
Restore-DbaDatabase -SqlServer Dest-InstanceName -Path $Local_Transfer_Folder -WithReplace -UseDestinationDefaultDirectories 

Last but not least… I’ll have to check for orphaned user and clean up everything…

#Repair orphaned users
Repair-SqlOrphanUser -SqlServer Dest-InstanceName

#Cleanup after Restoring
Get-ChildItem -Path $Local_Transfer_Folder -Include *.bak -File -Recurse | foreach { $_.Delete() }

Now I’m triggering the script every day with a SQL Server Agent Job what makes it even easier for me as DBA. (but be careful – dbatools run only with a PowerShell version > 3 => SQL Server 2014 if you use a PowerShell step)

The job runs ~12 minutes including importing dbatools module, Backup three databases (~280GB) and restoring them on the test server which I think is a good runtime!

At the end, I’m having more time to read any books, tweets or other blog posts 😉

My former blog post about another database copy job can be found here: Copy Database with Rename using dbatools

Special Thanks to Jason Wasser @wasserja for his great logging function!
https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Write-Log-PowerShell-999c32d0

and to Derik Hammer for his list of PowerShell version in SQL Server and how to implement PowerShell into Agent Steps…
https://www.sqlhammer.com/running-powershell-in-a-sql-agent-job/