Question

If I want to log into a SQL Server instance using another Windows account can I do this by simply selecting “SQL Server Authentication” as my authentication mode and entering the DOMAIN/username and password for the account I want to use?

Are there any special settings that I need to set in order to get this to work?

Answer 1

No. ‘SQL Server Authentication’ works only with SQL Server logins, it won’t work with a NT login. To log in as another credential have the process run as the credential you desire to run as. Use runas, most likely you want to run SSMS like this:

runas /netonly /user:domain\user "c:\program files\...\ssms.exe"

By specifying the /netonly argument your SSMS will run with the desired NT credential only for remote hosts, locally will have your local credentials. This not only preserves your SSMS environment (last used files, options etc) and doesn’t require domain\user to have local priviledges, but, more importantly, it works even for a completely unrelated domain. That is if you machine is in domain foo (or not even joined to the domain) and the desired runas is in domain bar, the runas /netonly /user:bar\user ... will run just fine.

The /netonly trick works only if the SQL server host you are connecting to is remote (not on the same machine). If is local, then your runas must be locally using the desired credential, so remove the /netonly argument.