Question

We currently have an issue with our MSSQL 2005 database. We’ve recently undergone a migration from windows server 2003 to 2008. SQL Server has remained as 2005. I’m using SQL Server Management Studio to work on.

All the tables in the database follow the format: [SCHEMA].[TABLE_NAME]

When I enter the SQL:

SELECT * FROM [table_name]

I get the error message: Invalid object name ‘[table_name]’.

If I type in:

SELECT * FROM [schema].[table_name]

This works fine. The username we log into the database with owns the schema which is prepended to all the table names.

The problem is, we have 3rd party companies which have software which exports data from the database. 2 companies have now tried to run their exporters, however are getting the error ‘Invalid object name’. The software is logging in with the username which owns the schema.

My question is exactly the same as this one I’ve found on the internet:
http://www.sqlteam.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=99802

However the answer on that question seems to be full of keywords rather than actual sentences which makes it very hard to understand.

If anyone could help, it’d be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

Phil

Answer 1

Set the default schema for the 3rd party’s username to the schema their un-prefixed references should point to:

ALTER USER foo WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = [bar];

(This is different from owning the schema.)

And tell them to write software correctly. In SQL Server you should always be specifying the schema name, even if you always use dbo.