SpinTax and Calling C# from PowerShell

What is SpinTax? SpinTax is a way of “spinning” text. It’s often used by somewhat spammy marketing programs to post different words, phrase, or articles to different web or social media sites. It is designed to create somewhat readable but yet random text, based on changing synonyms for various words. There are actually programs that […]

Error: No BizTalk Configuration database(s) found on server ‘(local)’

It’s a fairly common practice to change the Deploy Server from a specific machine name to “.” or “(local)”. I’m at a new client, where the security isn’t all set up properly. So when I changed the server name to “(local”) I got the error: No BizTalk Configuration database(s) found on server ‘(local)’ Since I’m […]

Internals of BizTalk Databases – Part 1

For a while, I’ve been wanting to explore deeper or “hack” into the internals of the BizTalk Databases, i.e. BizTalkMsgBox and BizTalkDTA. When do records gets stored in these database, how long do they stay there, and when do they get “cleaned-up”. So here is my first scenario.  I use a SQL command to Find […]

Comparing Cursors between Oracle and Microsoft SQLServer

  In this blog, I’ll be showing how a Microsoft cursor in T-SQL is similar to and different from the most similar cursor in Oracle.  Oracle actually has 3 or 4 ways to do “explicit” cursors, so in this blog, we will look only at the one that is most similar. I tried to format […]

Comparing “Create Table” between Oracle and Microsoft SQLServer

For this blog, I create an employee table using the Oracle’s GUI tool called “SQL Developer”.  I then exported that syntax to a file.With a few changes I added to Microsoft SQL Server (after adding the schema first), and modified it to include a primary key. My only reason to port this over was to […]

Best Examples of Join-Path in PowerShell

Below I have put together some of my favorite examples of how to use Join-Path. One of the primary features it to be able to combine a folder and a filename, without caring if the folder ends with a trailing slash or not. That is the first thing illustrated below (Path1/Path2). Path3 shows how to […]

Estimated Completion Time and Progress Bar in Powershell

<h1>Estimated Completion Time in PowerShell</h1> Progress Bars are all about giving the user feedback as to what the program is doing, and Powershell implements it with the Write-Progress cmdlet. It is also possible to predict the completion time by using a little math. Possible uses for the progress bar include: Showing status of reading a […]

How to Catch SQL Stored Proc Errors in PowerShell

In a prior blog, I demonstrated how to call a SQL Stored Proc from Powershell.  But that article did not discuss error handling. In the stored proc, it stored two tables in a parent/child relationship.  If the parent “key” was not found, then the child row cannot be stored. The parent is the based on […]

How to get a single return value from an ExecuteNonQuery SQL stored procedure in Powershell

Sometimes you call SQL just to store data, but even then, sometimes you need the key of the row just stored. This code will show you how to get back that single return value when calling a stored proc, even when it is an “ExecuteNonQuery” stored proc, that returns no row sets. It is typical […]

Cannot Connect to Amazon RDS with SSMS

Cannot connect to Amazon RDS with SSMS Amazon allows you to run an Relational Database Server (RDS) that runs several of the common editions of Microsoft SQLServer. After setting up your RDS server/instance and launching it, you may have issues connecting to it. Cannot connect to SQLServer – Error Message Microsoft SQLServer has a very […]