Creating Multiple Files with Content Using PowerShell

This post aims to explain a straight forward yet effective PowerShell functionality which can help the user in creating more than one file with specified content.

This can be useful for developers, system administrators or any user who wishes to generate files quickly for testing purposes or something else.

The PowerShell Function

Here’s a PowerShell function that allows you to create a specified number of files in a folder, with the option to include custom content.

If you’ve used the data masking command in dbatools you’ve probably noticed that the PowerShell session becomes memory intensive when it has to handle larger tables with one or more unique indexes. The reason that happens is that during the data masking process the command looks for any unique indexes in the table. If it finds a unique index it will create a unique row for all the columns in the unique index. The command creates the values in memory. This means that you’ll have all the values that eventually get inserted into a table in memory. This can lead to a massive amount of memory being used when you have wider unique indexes with large data types. There was also another problem that I had to fix and that was that it would create those unique values for every unique index. This was also the case when there were overlapping columns when multiple unique indexes were being used. This was not efficient and I wanted to make something better for that too. I’ve been thinking about solutions for this problem because I think this command should be usable in almost every situation.

Consider the following scenario, you’re a database developer and your company has just decided that they want to implement DevOps for databases. You have multiple databases that need to be put under source control and each database needs its database project. The first thing you’ll need to do is decide whether or not you want to use migration-based or state-based deployments. This post is not going to discuss the pros and cons of these different methods, instead, we’re going to use state-based migrations using SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) solutions.

The dbatools module recently got a couple of new commands mask data in their databases. One feature with the masking commands that were not yet put in was deterministic masking.

What is deterministic masking

Deterministic masking is the process of replacing a value in a column with the exact value across tables. For example, a database has multiple tables with a column that has first names. With deterministic masking, the first name that’s present will always be replaced with the same value.

The dbatools module recently got a couple of new commands mask data in their databases. One feature with the masking commands that were not yet put in was deterministic masking.

What is deterministic masking

Deterministic masking is the process of replacing a value in a column with the exact value across tables.

For example, a database has multiple tables with a column that has first names. With deterministic masking, the first name that’s present will always be replaced with the same value.