Good News, Everyone!

Dbatools has finally reached critical mass to be released as version 1.0. This is a major step for the maintainers and developers of this module. It has been the goal for over 18months. The quick and dirty on it is this:

• Cross Platform Support
• MFA for Azure Support in cmdlets
• New cmdlets for managing DBRoles
• Change Log of every subversion shipped to the PowerShell Gallery
• Digitally signed so cmdlets work in restricted environments
• Optimized for importing
• Over 550 cmdlets available for automating Microsoft SQL Instances
  • Nearly 5x the cmdlets available in the MS SQL Server Module 
• The quality of the cmdlets has also gone up with 1000s of Integration tests
  • Check out the current health dbatools.io/boh
• Parameters, Internal Code structure and Error handling have been Standardized

These are just the high points that stick out in my mind at this time. There are quite a few blogs being released today highlighting some of the other great features coming to V1.0 (Read More at https://dbatools.io/dbatools10)

If this is the first you are hearing about Dbatools download it now (Install-Module Dbatools) and give it a spin!

Personal Journey to V1.0 pro

For me personally, the journey for Dbatools reaching 1.0 has been a big part of my own professional growth.

Back in 2016 I started on a team that was understaffed and drowning in technical debt. Suddenly, I was handed the Dba responsibilities after a senior systems engineer retired. I did not know much about Databases, and was more of a PowerShell enthusiast. I ended up discovering Dbatools while trying to troubleshoot a network latency issue with our Data Architect. I then started to use it further when migrating from a 2012 AG to 2016 AG cluster. (Using this module actually helped inspire me to start this blog.)

In 2017 I attended PASS Summit trying to up my Dba skills, but found myself drawn to all of the PowerShell sessions. I just happened to see Aaron Nelson give a talk on Reporting Services w/ PowerShell and was trying to find him at lunch to ask a question. I sat down at his table, but instead of talking with him I ended up talking with Stuart Moore, Sander Stad, and ConstantineK, about how I was using dbatools and just happened to find out that these guys were some of the main contributors. (I also accidentally stalked them the rest of the week). Later that week I also met Chrissy LeMarie and Shawn Melton who both encouraged me to contribute (Thanks for doing this and being Awesome!). 

I did a few PRs in 2017, but finally in 2018, I started to try to do some more consistent PRs to the project. While I have never felt like a true Data Professional, I felt pretty confident in PowerShell, so most of my pull requests have been focused around the Integration Tests, and PSScript Analyzer rules. While writing tests is not glamorous, I honestly used it as an opportunity to learn various aspects of SQL Servers since most integration tests require you to get/set/update objects on an instance. So if I am writing a test to Copy a DB Mail object, I probably need to understand how to configure it using TSQL first. 

And Beyond!

Now that Dbatools is at Version 1.0, the expectation is that there will be more stable changes and notification of any major breaking change. There will also be more development for cloud native databases, continued support for cmdlets running on Linux, and whatever cmdlets the community needs.

I am personally going to continue working on integration tests to raise the overall code coverage of the cmdlets. I would also like to work on adding requested cmdlets that have been sitting in the queue for a few months, and maybe even some Linux specific cmdlets.

Conclusion

Not enough can be said for Chrissy, and the hard work she and the team have been doing in launching Dbatools into this next phase. The beauty of the SQL Collaborative is that they have been able to quickly react to the needs of the MS SQL community and have a promise to keep doing this in the years to come.