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Updating TLS in PowerShell to Allow Set-PSRepository to Run
I was recently working on a client server and need to install the Az PowerShell module. I opened and administrator window and typed
Install-Module Az
and received this error:
WARNING: Unable to find module repositories.
Searching the error, I was told to run
Register-PSRepository -Default
The command completed without an error, but I got the same error when trying to install the
module. Az
Some additional digging led me to check the TLS version PowerShell was running. It turned out it was using TLS 1.0. Running this command updated TLS to 1.2:
[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12
and allowed the Register-Repository command to execute successfully.
Thanks for reading and I hope this helps.
It’s Been a Strange Two Years
My last post on this blog was almost two years ago. That was coming out of PASS Summit 2019 and my last post recounted how much I enjoyed that experience. It was about the same time that we started hearing news of the COVID-19 virus. In late February 2020, I had the pleasure of attending SQL Saturday Tampa. It was a wonderful time. Sadly, it would be my last SQL Saturday.
The lockdown resulting from COVID-19 led to the demise of PASS. I won't go into detail here, but the lack of an in-person conference reduced revenue streams to the point that PASS was forced to declare bankruptcy. The day PASS ceased to exist was a sad one, but as many have said, PASS isn't the community, the community members are.
I have been incredibly fortunate to be a part of that community for 10 years. My involvement has provided immeasurable benefits, both personally and professionally. I have gotten jobs, presented across the country, and become friends with amazing people.
It is those benefits that have driven me to give back to the community. I've received so much -- and I'd never be able to pay it all back, but I'm sure going to try. The past two years have been strange and difficult in a lot of ways. Not being able to join the community in person is one of the most hardest things.
I am planning to become more active in the last days of 2021 and hope to hit my stride at the start of 2022. Watch this blog for posts and my first foray into video presentation.
I hope you are surviving and thriving in these strange times and hope to meet in person in the near future.
PASS Summit 2019 – The Best One Yet
In 2019, I attended my 11th PASS Summit. Every year I say it is better than the last. Usually this comes down to the fact that I know more people each year. That was the case again this year, but I cannot remember being as excited about the content I learned at the conference.
If you had told me going in that a tool was the thing I would be most excited about, I would have thought you were crazy. But it's true, and that tool is Azure Data Studio (ADS). ADS is a fork off of the VSCode project and allows connections to databases on prem and in Azure. It also provides a link to source control systems. The thing that has me so excited about ADS is the ability to build notebooks.
Notebooks are files that allow code to be combined with text more robustly than a T-SQL or PowerShell script with comments. The text is written using markdown, which is a simple markup language that allows formatting. Code can be placed in line with markdown text and can be executed from within the notebook. As of November 4, ADS supports both T-SQL and PowerShell.
The utility of notebooks was brought home when Bob Ward ran all of the demos for his SQL Server 2019 Summit precon using notebooks. That was pretty cool, but what was amazing is that he made those notebooks publicly available via GitHub. Once you have installed ADS, you can download that GitHub repo and run the demo code. The markdown provides information about and instructions for executing the code. An example of one of the notebooks is shown below:
In the example above, the markdown text is above the code cell. The play button in the code cell allows execution of the query. The query messages and results appear below the code cell. When the notebook is saved, the query results are saved with it. This makes them perfect for creating runbooks, wikis, and process documentation.
I've created demos for a presentation on two of the new features in SQL Server 2019, Accelerated Database Recovery and in-memory metadata for tempdb. Because PowerShell is supported, I am able to run docker commands within the notebook to build out a demo instance in seconds. You can find my demo notebooks here.
I hope you find this post useful. Let me know if you have any questions.
Note: The code in my notebooks has been modified from the SQL Server 2019 notebooks from Bob Ward's precon. Many thanks to Bob and the SQL Tiger Team for making these available. Also, thanks to Vicky Harp, Alan Yu, and the rest of the Azure Tools team for ADS. Keep your eye out for updates to ADS, because additional functionality is coming.