Question

I want to rename a database, but keep getting the error that ‘couldn’t get exclusive lock’ on the database, which implies there is some connection(s) still active.

How can I kill all the connections to the database so that I can rename it?

Answer 1

The reason that the approach that Adam suggested won’t work is that during the time that you are looping over the active connections new one can be established, and you’ll miss those. You could instead use the following approach which does not have this drawback:

-- set your current connection to use master otherwise you might get an error  use master ALTER DATABASE YourDatabase SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE   --do you stuff here   ALTER DATABASE YourDatabase SET MULTI_USER