I hit the following issue this morning when I tried viewing the properties of a SQL Server database using SSMS:
Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio
Cannot show requested dialog.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Cannot show requested dialog. (SqlMgmt) Property Owner is not available for Database ‘[databasename]’. This property may not exist for this object, or may not be retrievable due to insufficient access rights. (Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo)
You might think this is indeed permission related by the error message, but it turned out to be because the database owner was NULL (empty). I’m not sure how or why this happened, and some forums suggest this can happen even when the owner is not set to SA. Obvisouly I couldn’t check this through SSMS, so I ran the following query to find out the owner of each database through a T-SQL script:
SELECT name,
suser_sname(owner_sid) AS owner,
state_desc
FROM sys.databases
For a SQL Server 2000 instance, you can use this:
SELECT name,
suser_sname(sid)
FROM sysdatabases
This revealed NULLs for a couple of databases in the instance, so I set the owner to SA using the following:
USE Northwind EXEC sp_changedbowner 'sa'
…tried accessing the properties through SSMS again and it worked like a charm 😉
I was looking into permissions for a bit, but I was baffled because i had sysadmin for the instance. THanks for your post, as this was my problem. The database had no owner, i gave it an owner and now i can see the database properties!
Suddenly got same problem, thank you for post the solution!
Thanks!! for the post. It is very useful.