Invoke-SqlCmd ist a great cmdlet for PowerShell for querying SQL databases. But sometimes you don’t want to install the extra requirement SQL Server Management Objects on the server.
Invoke-SqlCmd -ServerInstance $Server -Database $Database -Query "SELECT * FROM Staff"
There’s an simple alternative. Use the .NET classes in the System.Data.SqlClient namespace which are available on every computer which has the .NET framework installed.
function SqlQuery($server, $database, $query)
{
$connection = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection
$connection.ConnectionString = "Server=$server;Database=$database;Integrated Security=True;"
$connection.Open()
$command = $connection.CreateCommand()
$command.CommandText = $query
$result = $command.ExecuteReader()
$table = new-object “System.Data.DataTable”
$table.Load($result)
$connection.Close()
return $table
}
SqlQuery $Server $Database "SELECT * FROM Staff"
4 replies on “Alternative for Invoke-SqlCmd”
Hi there,
This was brilliant, except I wasted some time because of extra ” surrounding “System.Data.DataTable” that were causing errors.
I was getting an error saying “Cannot find type [System.Data.Table]” until I removed the ” so that line of code looks like:
$table = new-object “System.Data.DataTable”
and it ran perfectly.
Thought I’d give you a heads up. Using Powershell 4.
Thanks.
Great post Peter especially because this would work no matter what the version of Powershell your machines has. It is quite a pain to install packages in Powershell especially in the lower versions of windows. Furthermore syntactically this is close to how a connection is created in Java and other object oriented languages.
Why they dont’t take this as a relacement for Invoke-SqlCmd in dotnet core which is still not working?
Thanks for this, works perfectly!
Brilliant, Thank You for Sharing.