Question

I have a local windows managed service that is trying to connect to a local instance of SQLExpress and am hitting a brick wall wrt the connectionstring / the authentication that the local service needs to use.

Here is the config for the managed service

<add key="..." value="Data Source=<machineName>\SQLEXPRESS;Persist Security Info=True; Integrated Security=True" />

The interesting thing is that this works but only provides access to the master db. It does not give any access to the actual db that the service needs. I have tried all sorts of possibilities in SQL Management Studio re giving access / security / user but to no avail.

I have tried using initial catalog but get a security exception

<add key="..." value="Data Source=<machineName>\SQLEXPRESS;Persist Security Info=True;inital catalog=<dbName>; Integrated Security=True" />

I am also working on the assumption that

a. The Log-on used by the managed service is a red herring and this is indeed a SQLServer issue.

b. If the SQLServer were not local then the managed service would need AD credentials.

Answer 1

1. To gain access to a particular DB other than master you need to add:
   “Initial Catalog=MyDatabase;” (without quotes) to your connection string.
2. The service logon account must be granted logon privileges to SQL Server Express
3. The service logon account must have a user mapping in the database(s) you wish to access from the service.

The last two steps can be accomplished from SQL Server Management Studio.

Happy coding