I was recently asked to write a quick blog for a local Tech Group. You can read it here. I commented on some trends in SQL Server there. But I wanted to add a thought on a particular positive trend I’ve been seeing in the design of SQL Seerver itself.

As regular readers will know I’m a huge fan of PowerShell and have been using and writing about it more and more. But, I came across a requirement last week where PowerShell would have been overkill. Basically, my client and I had identified a number of databases that had the wrong owner. We wanted to change them over to the proper owner.

Now, being old school, my first reaction was to call sp_changedbowner. Any DBA who has been around for enough years has probably seen this and used it. But, if you look at the most recent webpage from Microsoft, you’ll notice a light blue box that has a warning:

 Important

This feature is in maintenance mode and may be removed in a future version of Microsoft SQL Server. Avoid using this feature in new development work, and plan to modify applications that currently use this feature. Use ALTER AUTHORIZATION instead.

Now on one hand, since this was a one-off script, I could have safely used sp_changedbowner. But there is an issue with it. It has to be run in the database you want to change the owner of. There is no parameter to specify the database. Now to change the owner on a single database, that’s not an issue. Go into the database and run the sproc.

But, when you might have a dozen databases, that becomes a lot of work.

Now, my first inclination for something like this is to write a query similar to:

select name, ‘sp_changedbowner ”newowner”’ from sys.databases where owner_sid != SUSER_ID(‘oldowner’);

This would generate a nice list, except that we’d still have to go into each database and execute the command. Now, I could get a little smarter and write something like:

select ‘use ‘ + name + ‘ sp_changedbowner ”newowner” ‘ from sys.databases where owner_sid != SUSER_ID(‘oldowner’);

This has the advantage of putting in the USE command so I can change databases, but I still would have to manually insert carriage/return linefeeds.

So it’s a slight improvement, but only a slight one. Now, I could resort to PowerShell, get a list of databases and loop through them with a ForEach, but as I said, I wanted to keep this simple as it was basically a one-off (well really a three-off since I had to do it on DEV, UAT, PROD) but the point was still the same, I wanted to keep it fairly simple and try to keep it all in T-SQl.

But, if we go back to the notice that Microsoft I quoted above, we end up with a better solution.  Alter Authorization lets you put the name of the database right in the command.  So, something like this will work quite smoothly.

select ‘alter authorization on database::[‘+name+’] to newowner’ from sys.databases where owner_sid != SUSER_ID(‘oldowner’);

This results in a column that I can then cut and paste into a new window and execute without having to make any edits. It’s also a solution I know will work in the future.

I’ll add a final way some DBAs might have approached this and that is with the undocumented stored procedure sp_msforeachdb. However, I try to avoid that as much as possible because it is in fact undocumented and honestly, I find the syntax a bit confusing at times.

Anyway, the real point I wanted to make in this post was not necessarily how to change the DB owner, but to make an observation. Over the years, I’ve noticed that Microsoft has been improving T-SQL and making tasks that once were unncessarily complicated easier to script out. It’s easier to change a DB owner now than it was to do so years ago. This is evident in other areas of SQL Server. There are many items that previously were easier done via SSMS or perhaps could pretty much only be done by SSMS that can now be done via script (and of course pretty much any action you can do in SSMS now has a “Script” option so you can script it out, modify it if needed and save it.)

So, my pattern lately has been, “script everything” and Microsoft has certainly been making that easier!