Friday, September 18, 2009

ERROR: Cannot use the special principal 'sa'. Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 15405

As of May 2012 This is The Most Popular Post For People To Come To This Blog.
People must be having this issue all over the world!
Symptom:

You tried to create or alter a table column (or likewise attributes in a table) with Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio and get the following error.

ERROR: Cannot use the special principal 'sa'. Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 15405

You can get into the SQL server with 'sa' in Mixed Mode authentication. You have even given the sa permissions to all of the databases.

Root Cause:

The database ownership is still not correct when you restored or re-attached database. This happens for example, if you restore a database using an integrated authentication account.


Try This Fix:

Open the SQL Query windows in the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, and try something that resemble below by changing. TheNameOfYourDatabase to the database you are using. Do this with every database that you have that you need the 'sa' access. This will change the owner of the database to the account you designate.

use TheNameOfYourDatabase
exec sp_changedbowner 'sa', 'true'

5 comments:

Ashif Manjur said...

Thanks for the helpful post...I was stuck at this error...saved me some time...:)

Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot... It works for me!!!

sunny said...

Successful solution

vipul said...

Vipul Dumaniya

Thanks a lot it works for me

Anonymous said...

Thank you soo much for this. Been on support call for 1:23 for unrelated issue and this was holding us up due to the db restore to a different server.