I’m in the middle of a server migration and so I’m setting up log shipping to get the databases consistent between the two servers prior to cutting over.

The backup copy over the WAN was taking a long time and so I had a lot of transaction log files that I needed to apply. I could have let log shipping take care of performing the log restores, but I found that a secondary process had created log backups also, just with different names. This lack of consistency was causing me a problem so I needed a quick way to build a restore command of all the files in order.

This was a quick win for PowerShell. I was able to quickly grab a list of the files in date order and pipe those to a string and build the restore command. This I was able to copy into SSMS and perform the restores.

$filelist = dir LogShippingPrimaryp$backup | where-object {$_.Extension -eq '.trn'} | Sort-Object {$_.CreationTime} | select Name

foreach ($file in $filelist)

{

$restorefile = $file.Name

$text = "restore log MyDatabase from disk = 'P:ForRestore$restorefile' with norecovery;"

Write-Output $text

}

If you wanted to take this a step further you could actually use invoke-sqlcmd to execute the $text string and perform the restore (don’t even contemplate doing that if you aren’t running at least SQL 2008 R2). I always prefer to do that within SSMS though.

While I’ve used this script for a migration task it also works really well if you need to perform a point in time restore for your database from a full backup and some transaction log backups. Can you imagine how long it would take you to build out the restore string to recover a database which had transaction log backups every 15 minutes for the last 20 hours? That’s 80 log files. Want to do that manually? This is a much nicer way to go.