Take Ownership of the Sharepoint Database in SBS 2008

Assigning ownership of the SBS 2008 Sharepoint WSS 3.0 Databases when you are not able to access the properties of the WSS 3.0 Databases in SQL Server Studio Express

Run the SQL Server Studio Express as Admin

Elevate your privileges when you run the application or you will not be able to connect to the databases.

Use the Named Pipes String

The Sharepoint Database instance uses a named pipes name instead of the usual database instance so make sure you enter this correctly.

The error that is the reason for all this

Here is the problem, I am logged on to my SBS Server as my custom administrator account I used for my migration from SBS 2003. However this account does not have rights to the database by default, in fact no account does, the database has an owner that is NULL. This means we need to assign an owner to the database to be able to see the properties of the database. The Administrator account in SBS 2008 is disabled by default and we need to reenable this and then logon to the SBS 2008 console as this account so we can assign a database owner.

Change the database owner

Once you have logged onto the SBS 2008 console as the Administrator and you have opened SQL Server Studio Express you can use this query to change the database owner. First you need to find the name of the Sharepoint Config database, it has a name in the convention Sharepoint_Config_*********

Use the command as shown above to select the database and then run the sp_changedbowner to change the owner to our Administrator account.

Check the ownership

Once the change ownership command is executed you can test the change with the query sp_helpdb Sharepoint_Config_********

Access Database Properties

Now you are able to access the properties of the database!