Using PowerShell to send data from SQL Server to service via SOAP - web-services

Question

I'm fairly new to PowerShell and brand new (as in, today) to web services and SOAP. A vendor gave us documentation on their web service API that allows the creation of user accounts. I'm trying to use PowerShell to pull our users from SQL Server and send the data to their service. We will need to add users on an ongoing basis.
Below is a pared-down version of what I came up with and it actually seems to work; the vendor told me to include a dry_run parameter while testing and I'm getting a dry_run_success from the response_type.
My question is: Is this even close to being the appropriate way to do it with PowerShell?
# Open ADO.NET Connection to database
$dbConn = New-Object Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection;
$dbConn.ConnectionString = "Data Source=mydbserver;User ID=someuserid;Password=mypassword;Initial Catalog=mydatabase";
$dbConn.Open();
$sql = "select * from mytable";
$dbSqlCmd = New-Object Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand $sql, $dbConn;
$dbRd = $dbSqlCmd.ExecuteReader();
# Create a Web Service Proxy
$proxy = New-WebServiceProxy -Uri https://somedomain.com/service/wsdl
$namespace = $proxy.GetType().NameSpace
$param = New-Object($namespace + ".somemethod")
# Loop through records from SQL and invoke the web service
While ($dbRd.Read())
{
$param.user_id = $dbRd.GetString(0)
$param.password = $dbRd.GetString(1)
$param.display_name = $dbRd.GetString(2)
$request = $proxy.TheMethod($param)
if ($request.response_type -eq 'error')
{
$request.error.extended_error_text
}
}
# Clean up
$dbRd.Close();
$dbSqlCmd.Dispose();
$dbConn.Close();

Answer 1

A couple things you could improve:
Don't use select * in your SQL queries. Always specify the fields you need, in the order you need. As written, if someone were to restructure the table such that the user ID wasn't the first column, you'd have a mess on your hands because you're accessing the fields by their ordinal number
You're apparently storing those passwords in plaintext in your database. Anyone with access to your database knows the credentials for every one of your users. This is a very bad thing. Resolving this could be a very big discussion.
Your code keeps the database connection open until the script completes. Given the scope here, it's probably not going to cause a major problem, but your database access strategy should be to get in, get your data, get out & disconnect as quickly as possible.
$sql = "select user_id, password, display_name from mytable";
$QueryCmd = $dbConn();
$QueryCmd.CommandText = $sql;
$SqlAdapter = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlDataAdapter;
$QueryCmd.Connection = $dbConn;
$SqlAdapter.SelectCommand = $QueryCmd;
$DataSet = New-Object System.Data.DataSet;
$SqlAdapter.Fill($DataSet)
$dbConn.Close();
$dbConn.Dispose();
$MyResults = $DataSet.Tables[0];
$MyResults | foreach-object {
$param.user_id = $_.user_id;
$param.password = $_.password;
$param.display_name = $_.display_name;
$request = $proxy.TheMethod($param);
if ($request.response_type -eq 'error')
{
$request.error.extended_error_text;
}
}