As someone who recently got his first exposure to PowerShell, I'll chime in that the case I needed to deal with was one where it added complexity.
In summary:
I need to pull data from a company we're partnered with, and get it into our systems. They ship it as SQL Server backup files. OK, no big deal, we can mount those up and run queries to dump stuff out to whatever format we like and ingest it.
Except part of that data is files, which were stored in the DB as binary blobs (in a table along with filenames and metadata). Need to get those out of there and into our storage as real files. OK, no big deal, I can just query for filename and file contents, dump out onto disk and then batch-transfer into our archival storage, right?
Except no matter what kind of obvious shell-idiom method I try to use, it doesn't work because PowerShell stubbornly insists that I must be working with text data when I'm using all those handy shell constructs, and so the files end up corrupt.
So now instead of just being able to shove data through pipes like I would on Unix (which, for all its faults, doesn't really care whether I'm sending binary or text data), I have to have my script go and instantiate objects for creating a file and reading and writing binary streams, and remember to clean up after them, and my script ends up way more complicated.
What would have been a pretty simple script anywhere else now has to know a bunch of .NET libraries and how to create and work with their types, and that's less useful to me.
Its true that powershell being a new tech probably doesn't have the large library of "known ways" to do things that the UNIX world has. And BTW I'm not even a powershell person. I write embedded software in C++ for a living ! Having said that, I'd imagine you would parameterize something like
Invoke-Sqlcmd -Query "SELECT ..." and write it out to a file?
or avoid it and just use BCP "select blah" queryout "c:\file.jpg" etc etc
In summary:
I need to pull data from a company we're partnered with, and get it into our systems. They ship it as SQL Server backup files. OK, no big deal, we can mount those up and run queries to dump stuff out to whatever format we like and ingest it.
Except part of that data is files, which were stored in the DB as binary blobs (in a table along with filenames and metadata). Need to get those out of there and into our storage as real files. OK, no big deal, I can just query for filename and file contents, dump out onto disk and then batch-transfer into our archival storage, right?
Except no matter what kind of obvious shell-idiom method I try to use, it doesn't work because PowerShell stubbornly insists that I must be working with text data when I'm using all those handy shell constructs, and so the files end up corrupt.
So now instead of just being able to shove data through pipes like I would on Unix (which, for all its faults, doesn't really care whether I'm sending binary or text data), I have to have my script go and instantiate objects for creating a file and reading and writing binary streams, and remember to clean up after them, and my script ends up way more complicated.
What would have been a pretty simple script anywhere else now has to know a bunch of .NET libraries and how to create and work with their types, and that's less useful to me.