Should a Data Warehouse Developer Know Powershell Scripts?

Question

I am a SQL Server data warehouse developer (2005 and 2008) (SSIS, SSAS, SSRS, SQL), and I wonder if it is worth the time and time to study Powershell scripts. Are there applicable developmental applications? I understand that from a DBA point of view, Powershell has significant power for administration — does this translate into useful developer commands?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I think that any tools you can add to your toolbox are an advantage no matter what your area of ​​expertise in IT.

Answer 2

I used Powershell for some automation tasks.

I also used C # WinForms applications to create SSIS packages.

I also have generated SQL for another platform from T-SQL.

I would think that none of them are in the basic DW toolkit, but I try to optimize my return on time and effort.

At any time, when you have an additional tool, this can be useful. The only caveat is that you need to balance:

1) Choosing the right tool for the job

2) Ensuring that the variety of tools used does not increase the complexity of the system (increasing maintenance costs) or reducing performance on the interfaces of subsystems, among the many problems that can arise if your system has many moving parts, aggravated by running in different paradigms / Environments / frames

Answer 3

While having more weapons in your arsenal is a good thing at all, from the point of view of the DW / SQL developer, there are not so many that Powershell will be especially useful for others than perhaps for some maintenance tasks. If you are missing shell scripts, continue to study it, but I would not expect it to pay huge dividends on the DW / SQL side.

Answer 4

Historically, I used Python for this kind of thing, since before Powershell, but I consider Powershell to be standard on Windows server platforms.

Sometimes the correct user interface is a scripted langauge. I used IronPython to create administrative utilities for things with the .NET API (for example, cube partition managers) in a number of cases. This is done explicitly, so that the staff can script to do this regardless of the release process - it allows them to control the system configuration.

Powershell will also do a good job of this, and these days you may well assume that it is available in a standard Windows server environment. As a language for development tasks such as code generators, you might be better off (say) Python, but Powershell works fine as a language. It is also becoming a good sweet spot for accessibility and political acceptability - since it comes with standard versions of Windows, there really is no excuse for the production staff to discourage deployment of systems with Powershell script components.