For resources you can use to learn Windows PowerShell, see Learning PowerShell.

For an overview of the SQL Server cmdlets and provider, see SQL Server PowerShell Overview.

Use the Get-Help cmdlet to get help in the Windows PowerShell environment. Get-Help provides basic help for the Windows PowerShell language and the various cmdlets and providers available in Windows PowerShell.

The SQL Server cmdlets support Get-Help. Get-Help returns cmdlet usage information, such as syntax and parameter descriptions. The following examples returns the full help for Invoke-Sqlcmd, help for just the parameters, and then help for just the examples:

Get-Help Invoke-Sqlcmd -Full
Get-Help Invoke-Sqlcmd -Parameter *
Get-Help Invoke-Sqlcmd -Examples

For more information on the ways you can use Get-Help to learn about cmdlets, see Get-Help: Getting Help.

The SQL Server provider also supports Get-Help. For example, this code returns basic information about the SQL Server provider:

Get-Help SQLServer

This code returns a list of the providers currently enabled in your Windows PowerShell session:

Get-Help -Category provider

For more information about getting provider help in Windows PowerShell, see Drives and Providers.

The Invoke-Sqlcmd cmdlet takes as input any query or script file that can be run by the sqlcmd utility. You can use Get-Help to get information about Invoke-Sqlcmd and its parameters, but there is no Get-Help coverage for the sqlcmd queries.

The -Query or -QueryFromFile input can contain:

• sqlcmd variables and commands. For information about these variables and commands, see the Remarks section of sqlcmd Utility.
  
• Transact-SQL statements. For information about the Transact-SQL language, see Transact-SQL Reference (Database Engine).
  
• XQuery statements. For information about the XQuery language supported by SQL Server, see XQuery Language Reference (Database Engine).
  

The SQL Server provider exposes the hierarchy of SQL Server objects in paths similar to file system paths. For example, this is the path to the Vendor table in the Purchasing schema of the AdventureWorks database in a default instance of the Database Engine:

SQL:\MyComputer\DEFAULT\Databases\AdventureWorks\Tables\Purchasing.Vendor

The provider implements different drive nodes for the objects covered by different SQL Server management object models. Paths with the SQL: drive use the objects covered by the SQL Server Management Objects (SMO), such as tables and views. When you navigate to a node in a path, you can use the object model methods and properties that apply to that type of object.

You can use the Get-Member cmdlet to learn what methods and properties are available for a path node. For example, you can run this code to see the methods supported for the Databases node:

Set-Location SQL:\MyComputer\DEFAULT\Databases
Get-Item . | Get-Member -Type Methods

This code lists the properties for a variable that has been set to an SMO Table object:

$MyVar = New-Object Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SMO.Table
$MyVar | Get-Member -Type Properties

The documentation for the object models for the different drives are:

• SQL: drives.
  
  • For information about SMO concepts, see SQL Server Management Objects (SMO).
    
  • For SMO reference information, see Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.
    

Concepts

Help and Information