Illusory Follies

I had been doing some development on our application at work and had been using an outdated version of the database (I’m too lazy to actually stay in sync with the current design). Since most of my work was unrelated to the database itself (or at least the parts that were changin) it was no problem. But, when I finally did sync my laptop’s database with the new one I had some unexpected problems. Everything worked quite well for the application but when I tried to login using SQL Management Studio, I kept getting access issues. I could do certain things but not others (like for example I could view rows from tables but I couldn’t shrink the database). The error message I got was vague indicating that I couldn’t authenticate. I assumed a permissions issue and spent a while trying to figure out what it was.

It turns out, it’s because the new database was given a new name than the old one. Somehow (I don’t know if this is normal) I had assigned the old database as my default database for my user account. When it got wiped and a new one (with a new name) was loaded, it caused problems. The solution was to alter my default database for my user. All the mysterious messages went away.

This seems like bad design to me. When I login into SQL Management Studio I specifically was selecting the table that I wanted to connect to, but that didn’t solve the problem. It was just very cryptic and unhelpful. Maybe there’s some method to the madness but no luck yet.

It is Microsoft after all…