Question

Is there a better approach than trying to write and just catching the exception?

We have various versions of the same database and today I’m working against a readonly version, this is fine for 99% of my tasks but the application sometimes saves its state back to the DB and I’d like to be able to try this iff the underlying SQL Server instance is writable.

Answer 1

Run a query against the server checking what permissions your user login has for that database. There is a built-in Transact-SQL function to do this named HAS_PERMS_BY_NAME (Link to MSDN).

Example query to check if you have INSERT permissions.

SELECT HAS_PERMS_BY_NAME('database', 'OBJECT', 'INSERT');

Also have a look at FN_BUILTIN_PERMISSIONS (Link to MSDN). This MSDN page has listings of the possible values that you can use in HAS_PERMS_BY_NAME.

HTH,