Recently in one of my interaction with a DBA inside a big financial organization, I was surprised to see that the administrator was logging into a desktop / server using a different credential. What baffled me was the fact that he was logging off. I immediately asked, why are you doing this? He said, since he was using windows authentication, which was different from his normal credentials that for DB related activities he used to create a different session. After a bit of research, I found this to be a common practice in a number of organizations.
Many companies provide two different windows account to any Administrator. One “regular” account (example SQLAuthority\Pinal) is used for general work like emails, login to laptop etc. And another “admin” account (example SQLAuthority\adm_pinal) for administrative level tasks to be done on the server. The regular account would have no access to SQL Servers, but the admin – level account would. To make security stronger, the companies use a Windows account to connect to SQL Server.
This makes thing little interesting. If one has to connect to SQL Server from the laptop where the DBA has logged in with regular account, he/she has to do “Right Click” with Shift key pressed and then use “Run as Different user” to use the admin account.
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Pressing shift key is important otherwise we would not see that option. After choosing that, it would pop-up with user name and password window. If you notice, you would notice ssms.exe path which is used.
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Another way, which I prefer is using Run as command. The program runas.exe allows to let us tell Windows to run a program using a different user’s current network environment instead of the local environment. The full details and switches of the run as the program can be found in TechNet article.
I would normally create shortcut on desktop. Right Click and choose a new shortcut as shown below
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and give location/parameter as below
C:\Windows\System32\runas.exe /noprofile /env /user:SQLAuthority\adm_Pinal “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\130\Tools\Binn\ManagementStudio\Ssms.exe”
You need to change two things, user name and the correct path for SSMS.exe
Once it’s saved, you can double click and provide password on the command prompt. I have given a shortcut name as Admin SSMS in below screenshot. As soon as I double click, I see below
One credential is provided, SSMS would open with that windows account.
I must conclude by saying that if you are using SQL Authentication then you do not need to do this because Windows credentials are not passed to SQL Server.
Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)
Filed under: MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Image may be NSFW.
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