Dynamic Properties in Objects…. and performance!
So last post I talked about dynamic properties in objects, and it was pretty cool. Then a crazy thing happened, that same colleague who was playing around with a faster Get-ChildItem project? He decided to get some real work done and began working on a Office365 script but the Get-MailboxStatistics cmdlet is a little bit different with O365 in the TotalItemSize property is deserialized and pretty much only has a lousy string output. So how to get the raw number without the ToMB() method? A little Googling and we found an Exchange blog post using RegEx to strip out all the extra crud, and a dynamic property! In the years I’ve been using PowerShell I’ve never once seen a dynamic property and the very day I decided to learn it we actually found a real life usage! What are the odds? Anyway, the twist was the Exchange team was applying the Add-Member to an array of objects. I didn’t realize you could do that. And it worked!
Dynamic Fields in Objects – what?
Short post today, but I wanted to talk about dynamic properties in objects. I haven’t had too much need for this kind of thing, but the fact that PowerShell can do it so easily is pretty cool. Imagine having an object where you plug a value into one field and dynamically another field in the object changes based on that first value. Kind of sounds like a function, but it’s all done right in the object itself.
Building Modules
If you’re looking to read about Modules and what they are and how to make them, this isn’t the blog post for you. No, the problem I have is living with Modules. I’ve only recently begun using them with the new job, but they have quickly made a place in my heart because being able to just call a module over and reuse code saves so much time! But, as always happens, I want to make a change or fix a bug and that’s where modules fall on their face (a little). This is my attempt to address that fact.
Shrink SQL Log Files
If you’re a Windows Administrator and have Microsoft SQL Servers in your environment–and you’d be a rare bird if you didn’t–then you’ve encountered this problem. Backups are missed for awhile, massive restore is done, something happens and your transaction log file grows way too big. It’s not uncommon to find it being much larger then the actual database! If you’re like me you would RDP to the server, check out the data drive and see that the log file itself was out of size. You’d then hit Google to find out how to do a shrink file, then have open SQL Management Studio and try to figure out the logical name of the log file, then run the query. Usually about 20 minutes of lookups, all so you can run a SQL query that typically takes a few seconds to complete. Time to address this using PowerShell.
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