Please go to the download page to get the new version. The installer will automatically upgrade any previous version installed.

As always, this is a free update for registered customers.

Login failed for user 'sa'

This app installs its own SQL Server instance with SQL Server authentication and it manages the users including the sa account. There’s no way to change the ‘sa’ password from the application, so probably someone might have been playing with my instance.

I logged in to this server and connect to SQL Server using the osql tool using windows authentication:

osql -E -S .\MYAPP

I then reset the sa password back to the original one:

1> sp_password NULL, 'mypassword', 'sa'

Unfortunately, this didn’t solve the problem. So the ‘sa’ password was intact after all.

Next thing I checked was that mixed-mode authentication was indeed enabled. It was unlikely that someone had changed this but.

I checked the registry key:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\Instance Name\MSSQLServer\LoginMode

It had the correct value 2 which means mixed-mode.

What else to check? Ah, maybe the ‘sa’ login has been disabled. Let’s enable it again:

ALTER LOGIN sa ENABLE ;
GO
ALTER LOGIN sa WITH PASSWORD = 'mypassword';
GO

No luck, still can’t log in using the sa user.

Here I started to be worried about this issue. I checked the system logs, nothing special there. Some errors reporting that ‘sa’ was unable to connect to SQL Server and nothing else. I also checked the SQL Server errorlog file. Everything seemed normal.

I have to say that this company has no IT department per se, but a guy who regularly helps them with their domain, active directory, etc. This guy was on vacation and unreachable.

I had no other option that to ask my customer if they had made any changes to their server, hoping to get some clue about what was going on. And he confessed. They were making changes to the Windows security policy editor adding and removing permissions a few days ago. He didn’t know exactly what they did, only that they “touch” different things (ouch!!).

Anyway, not my problem. Fortunately this gave me the clue I was looking for. The ‘sa’ user was being affected by a Windows policy setting. So I fixed it using this code:

ALTER LOGIN [sa] WITH PASSWORD='mypassword', CHECK_POLICY=OFF
GO
ALTER LOGIN [sa] ENABLE
GO

Note the CHECK_POLICY parameter. It makes the login immune to domain setup changes.

In summary:

4 things to check if you can’t log in to SQL Server using the sa account

1. Check the password and provide a new one if necessary

   sp_password NULL, 'mypassword', 'sa'

2. Check that mixed-mode authentication is enabled

   HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\InstanceName\MSSQLServer\LoginMode

   Should have the value 2. If not, change it and remember to restart the service.

3. Enable the sa account

   ALTER LOGIN sa ENABLE

4. Check that the sa account is not being affected by the domain security policy

   ALTER LOGIN [sa] WITH PASSWORD='mypassword', CHECK_POLICY=OFF

The Decision

After carefully considering all the options and talking to our customers, partners, and MVPs it was decided to deprecate OracleClient as a part of our ADO.NET roadmap. 

I kind of understand this decision, they want to improve ADO.NET but don’t want to invest resources supporting other competing database systems. However, I think this is very inconvenient for .NET developers in general. This will force us to research which vendor has the appropriate library and pay for it. And of course, take another external dependency.

Good news for those vendors though.

If you try to document many DTS packages, the resulting HTML file could be so big that can take a while to load and render by the browser.

With this new version, you can split the documentation in various files, one per package. DTSDoc generates an index file automatically linking every package documented.

I think this feature will alleviate some customers which where having problems due the gigantic files produced by DTSDoc in some scenarios.

Please download DTSDoc 1.2.5; the installer will automatically upgrade any previous version, so there’s no need to uninstall anything.

Now you can type:

dbdesc SqlServer -Ls

It will output all the SQL Server instances visible from your computer. Also you can use -Ld to list the databases stored in a server:

dbdesc SqlServer -S Server1 -Ld

I’ve also changed the code to discover SQL Server instances on the network. The old one used a special ODBC network call which sometimes was unable to discover some servers. Now I’m using the .NET 2.0 API that should work much better.

As always, this is a free update for registered customers. Simply download and run the new installer and it will update any previous version of dbdesc.

dbdesc 3.1

Even though dbdesc supports SQL Server 2008 since RC0, it was not able to document CREATE TABLE scripts. Finally dbdesc is able to pick the latest SMO version and produce those scripts. If you try to document a SQL 2008 database from a machine without SQL Server 2008 you’ll need to install this component from Microsoft: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Management Objects. If this component is not available, the database will be documented just fine but table scripts will be missing.

dtsdoc 1.2.4

When using Data Driven Query Tasks or a Data Pump Tasks, you can apply some transformations to the data. The usual transformations are copying columns and running an ActiveX script. However there are others like ReadFile, WriteFile, UpperCaseString, and others. These transformations happen to have its own custom properties, and previous versions of dtsdoc were not documenting them.

This version also shows the package names of a server sorted alphabetically. You could do that before simply by clicking the list header, but an anonymous user asked why there were not sorted this way in the first place. Very true.

The ‘Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0′ provider is not registered on the local machine.

Last month I released a dbdesc version for 64-bit OS. It had some third-party libraries (read Firebird) targeting 64-bit.

When you target ‘Any CPU’ in a .NET application your app will be loaded using the “native” platform of the system. In XP/Vista 64 it will be loaded as a 64 bit application, which means that it expects to load 64 libraries. It cannot load a 32 bit-only libraries like the Microsoft Jet Engine. That’s the same reason why I needed to update the Firebird libraries to the 64-bit version and generate a new installer for dbdesc.

The solution is now clear. Dbdesc has to target the x86 platform. This way, I don’t need to use special 64-bit build of any third-party library and the same code will run fine on both 32 and 64 bit OS. For a relative small app like dbdesc, there’s no visible performance loss.

So, dbdesc 3.0.2 is out. This time just one installer; no matter which OS you run.

Great!

Also some minor bugs got fixed in this version.

I’ve added the link on the download page.

The answer is yes, dbdesc works just fine with SQL Server 2008 RC0 and even documents the new data types.

There is however a small issue… it won’t script tables. The current version of SMO does not support SQL Server 2008 databases and even though there is a workaround using DMO, I prefer to wait until the RTM version.

This new version comes with two major new features and several improvements:

• Support for MySQL 5.0 databases
• A Table Dependency Matrix is automatically generated which makes very easy to “see” the relationships between tables

Additionally, your credentials and database lists are now stored per server, which means less typing when documenting databases in different servers.

The extended properties editor has been improved too. Now it allows you to add descriptions to foreign key constraints, users and roles.

As usual, all these improvements are free for registered customers.

Download dbdesc 3.0 now

Please note that dbdesc 3.0 requires .NET Framework 2.0. I think that .NET 2.0 is widely spread now so it shouldn’t be a problem for anyone. I’ll be supporting dbdesc 2.2 too (which runs with .NET 1.1), even though no new features will be added, just bug fixes.