So you're not gunna be able to take it to output and then use it, because of that annoying header row that you'd have to skip.

Now the reason you don't want to care about the output is one of the annoying things of Invoke-SQLcmd is it assumes we include a header row for all the output. So we can do that through Invoke-SQLcmd within out Power Shell scripts. We don't care what the output is, we just need to run it in all our databases. So maybe you've got to do some, either third party command or some native command like say, run aesterproc. So this is going to be a great way to run commands against SQL Server from Power Shell, that aren't natively exposed in Power Shell. We can use the Invoke-SQLcmd command to run native T-SQL commands against the SQL Server instance. If you've got something that's got to run against every database you can just iterate through the databases very easily that way, by simply doing a dir on your database folder, and that'll give you a list of all your databases. So you can actually integrate it very nicely with the native Power Shell. So it's kind of cool in the way it does things there, 'cause you don't have to use the use command, you can just CD into your database and run whatever commands you need to run. So this is going to connect to SQL and let you navigate SQL as if it's like a file system from within Power Shell. So SQLPS, like I said, that's going to be our native functionality for Power Shell and SQL Server. Or we can declare a native SQL connection object and then actually run that natively. We're using Invoke-SQLcmd, so that's going to let us run commands against SQL from inside Power Shell. So they're going to be installed on the box, when you install SQL Server, when you install management tools. We can use the SQLPS commandlets, which are going to be what comes with SQL Server. So we've got a few different ways we can connect to SQL Server from Power Shell. All right, so let's look at some examples of how to actually connect to SQL Server.

Powershell sql server connection string