Question

How can I save the results from a Powershell command to a MS SQL DB?

For example:

I run this at a Powershell prompt: get-psdrive and it returns some results in a column view.

How can I take each element of the result and log it into a separate DB row/column?

Answer 1

I recommend saving the results of your command to a variable. Such as:

$drives = Get-PSDrive

The variable can be indexed like this:

First Element:

$drives[0]

Last Element:

$drives[-1]

You can iterate through each element with foreach:

foreach ($drive in $drives) {
    # current drive is $drive
}

Or the ForEach-Object cmdlet:

$drives | ForEach-Object {
    # current drive is $_
}

Now that you have the data to populate your table with you are ready to connect to the database and perform the database record inserts.

You can make use of the Powershell SQL server cmdlets or you can connect using .NET objects. Depending on what version of SQL server you have will drive your choice on which to use. SQL Server 2008 has Powershell cmdlets, 2005 does not. There is a wealth of information about the SQL server 2008 Powershell integration here. For SQL Server 2005 you have some different options. This question answer here provides a list of Powershell options to use with SQL Server 2005.

More Info:

When Powershell displays object information it uses a type system to selectively determine what properties of the object to display on the screen. Not all of the object’s are displayed. Powershell uses XML files to determine what properties to display which are stored in the Powershell directory:

dir $PSHOME/*format* | select Name

The objects returned from Get-PsDrive are of type System.Management.Automation.PSDriveInfo. The file PowerShellCore.format.ps1xml tells the formatting engine what properties to display in the Powershell window. It just might be that these are the exact properties you are looking for however many objects have additional properties that are not displayed. For example an object of type System.IO.DirectoryInfo will not have all it’s properties displayed by default. You can view the rest of the objects properties using the Get-Member cmdlet, for example:

Get-Item $env:windir | Get-Member

This will show all of the object’s methods and properties. You can also view all of the object’s properties using the Select-Object cmdlet using a wildcard for the property parameter:

Get-Item $env:windir | Select-Object -Property *

To access an objects properties values use the following syntax:

$objectVariable.ObjectProperty

Now that you know how to view an objects properties and access their values you’ll need to use this to construct an Insert SQL statement. Here is an example using the Invoke-SqlCmd cmdlet provided with SQL Server 2008.

Invoke-Sqlcmd -ServerInstance $env:COMPUTERNAME -Database Test -Query "Insert MyTable values ('a', 'b')"

Here’s an example looping through objects returned from Get-PsDrive assuming you have a table called MyTable and it has at least two columns which accept textual data:

Get-PsDrive | ForEach-Object {
    $providerName = $_.Name
    $providerRoot = $_.Root
    Invoke-Sqlcmd -ServerInstance $env:COMPUTERNAME -Database Test -Query "Insert MyTable values ('$providerName', '$providerRoot')"
}