Wednesday, February 14, 2007

"Unable to perform a SETUSER to the requested username" error

This was a new one on me:



Backstory: We have an application that runs a SQL job every time a set of data is checked out. (I didn't design it.) Our development server was recently demolished by the SAN team while they were trying to add a new HBA, so it had to be rebuilt from scratch. After the rebuild, SQL was at version 8.0.2039 (SP4 w/ no hotfixes) and the job wouldn't run. It would spit out the above error each time, which was breaking the app.

This error looked like a permissions issue to me, so I started out by checking the user mapping. We'll call the login that runs the application "CORP\AppUser." This user was a member of dbowner in the database in the job step, so that wasn't the problem. Tried sp_start_job from Query Analyzer using those credentials, which worked, but still produced the error. Tried starting the job using my credentials instead, which produced the same error.

Then I changed the job owner to the same account that SQLAgent runs under, and the job worked. So it was definitely a permissions issue. I decided to check out the specific sequence of events underneath firing off a job, so I ran a Profiler trace and found this...

exec sp_setuserbylogin N'CORP\AppUser', 1

Hmm, what's that? It's not in BOL, and I couldn't find it in the master DB. But clearly SQL is trying to execute it, which might explain why the error it's returning is looking for user ''. I dug around a bit more and found some code to add it back into master.

exec sp_addextendedproc N'sp_setuserbylogin', N'(server internal)'

Voila! As soon as I ran this code, the job worked like a charm. Apparently a botched SP3 or 4 install can miss this proc, which is what probably happened here. So if you come across this error, make sure you've got sp_setuserbylogin properly installed.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

From the documentation on the sp_addextendedproc arg1, arg2 stored procedure in the master database follows that the arg1 is a name of a new extended stored procedure, and the arg2 is the name of the dll file containing it's definition.

In your notation,

sp_addextendedproc N'sp_setuserbylogin', N'(server internal)'

what is the name of the "server internal" dll to be used, i.e. which dll file contains the definition of the sp_setuserbylogin extended stored procedure?

Thanks

Unknown said...

Max,

I haven't been able to locate documentation on the proper use of "N'(server internal)'", but my guess is that it accesses code in a SQL Server cab file or similar, which would not be accessible using the usual dll filename notation. The SQL Server Customer Advisory Team could probably provide you with more information.

Ira

Unknown said...

Ira,

What value did you use for the arg2? Was it literally the following: N'(server internal)'?

Thanks

Unknown said...

Yep, executed exactly as posted.

Unknown said...

I just want to thank you because the info that you provided regarding the SETUSER error resolved my issue and my job is no longer failing! Thank you very much! Steven Fink (stevenfink2@gmail.com)