I recently accepted an employment offer and now working in Downtown Denver. Anyhow, I was given a laptop as my workstation. Since it was a brand new built laptop not everything I needed was installed so I started installing/configuring the software. One point in time I need to start scripting and I opened the power shell window. First thing I checked to see the execution policy setting for my new built laptop. By default a new installation is set to 'Restricted' which does not allow to run a powershell scripts and PowerShell can only be used in interactive mode. Which is what I expected. So I started to configure the execution policy. Here are the steps for how to do it.
Open powershell by clicking start>run and typing 'powershell' (without the ticks) then hit enter. This will open powershell scripting environment.
1. Type 'Get-ExecutionPolicy' and hit enter, this will return the execution policy setting. There are 4 available options and I need to set the execution policy to 'RemoteSigned' to be able to run the scripts I have created and some downloaded from trusted sources. Here is the link to Microsoft that talks about the policy settings.
In my case, it was set to 'Restricted'
2. Type 'Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned' and hit enter. This is where I got an error message stating that access to the registry key 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsfot.PowerShell' is denied. So when this command is executed it tries to set the execution policy for the local machine for all the users. In my case I only need to set it for my user account not whole machine for all users.
3. Type 'Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser' and hit enter. No errors.
4. Type 'Get-ExecutionPolicy' and hit enter and I got 'RemoteSigned' back as the configure setting.
Now I can execute powershell scripts from SQL Server Agent job to do what I need. All of the above steps have been captured in the screen shot below.
HTH,
Bulent
