How to change the SQL Server password programmatically

mwories — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 02:32:00 GMT

Every now and the question comes up how to programmatically modify the service account or password of SQL Server. There basically two ways to accomplish this, using SMO, or WMI. This article shows you how to use WMI and VBScript to accomplish this task.

There are a couple of things you need to know.

SQL Server does not need a reboot when the password is modified. We (SQL Server Team) spent quite a bit of time ensuring you do not suffer any unnecessary downtime when performing an operation that has to happen regularly, when password are expiring. Everyone likes a ‘no reboot’ clause, right?
When changing the account and password, the service does need a reboot, but the WMI Provider does this for you. In fact, if the service is not started it will be brought up for a short moment. If it already running it will be restarted. The reasons are as follows:

The service master key needs to be re-encrypted
Various other security settings are done

Because the WMI Provider performs various operations besides changing the service account, other account change methods like ‘sc’ or the standard service control panel are not supported. You may see that the service will not start in some cases.
Changing the password only tells the service that the password has changed. If you want to change the account’s password, use a command like NET USER. You need to run that first.

The following scripts allow you to change the service account + password, or only the password:

setaccount.vbs:

‘ Set the account and password

set svr = GetObject("WINMGMTS:\\.\root\Microsoft\SqlServer\ComputerManagement:SqlService.ServiceName='MSSQL$YUKON',SQLServiceType=1")

svr.SetServiceAccount ".\TestUser", "NewPassword!!"

setpwd.vbs:

‘ Set the password

set svr = GetObject("WINMGMTS:\\.\root\Microsoft\SqlServer\ComputerManagement:SqlService.ServiceName='MSSQL$YUKON',SQLServiceType=1")

svr.SetServiceAccountPassword "", "NewPassword2!!"

You need to change 'MSSQL$YUKON' to match your instance name (replace ‘YUKON’ with the instance name, or the entire string with MSSQLSERVER for the default instance). Of course the account and password need to be changed as well.

Try this on a test server first before running this on a production server.

I hope this is helpful,

Michiel

Starting with SQL Server 2005 WMI with help of Scriptomatic

mwories — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 05:40:00 GMT

SQL Server 2005 introduces a new WMI Provider that allows configuration of Services, Client Network Protocols, and Server Protocols. This is a great improvement for DBA that are managing many SQL Servers, as WMI allows you to query and modify SQL Server configuration settings remotely.

Now, everyone who has worked with WMI knows it's not easy to write a WMI program. You need to know the namespace, class names, etc. Everything that helps developers so well in VS (IntelliSense, object browsers) is not available to the scripters that are working on a bare system. I typically have a couple of WMI templates on my pen drive and start from there.

I recently ran into Scriptomatic. It's a great tool to give you good starting points for creating WMI scripts. It provides you with a dropdown of namespaces available on the system, and classes within the selected namespace. It even allows creation of Perl scripts...!

Download it here and then select the root\Microsoft\SqlServer\ComputerManagement namespace; select the SqlService class and voila, a ready to run script is displayed in the window. Quite nice! Here is an VbScript example:

On Error Resume Next

Const wbemFlagReturnImmediately = &h10
Const wbemFlagForwardOnly = &h20

arrComputers = Array("C3PO")
For Each strComputer In arrComputers
   WScript.Echo
   WScript.Echo "=========================================="
   WScript.Echo "Computer: " & strComputer
   WScript.Echo "=========================================="

   Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\Microsoft\SqlServer\ComputerManagement")
   Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery("SELECT * FROM SqlService", "WQL", _
                                          wbemFlagReturnImmediately + wbemFlagForwardOnly)

   For Each objItem In colItems
      WScript.Echo "AcceptPause: " & objItem.AcceptPause
      WScript.Echo "AcceptStop: " & objItem.AcceptStop
      strAdvancedProperties = Join(objItem.AdvancedProperties, ",")
         WScript.Echo "AdvancedProperties: " & strAdvancedProperties
      WScript.Echo "BinaryPath: " & objItem.BinaryPath
      WScript.Echo "Clustered: " & objItem.Clustered
      strDependencies = Join(objItem.Dependencies, ",")
         WScript.Echo "Dependencies: " & strDependencies
      WScript.Echo "Description: " & objItem.Description
      WScript.Echo "DisplayName: " & objItem.DisplayName
      WScript.Echo "ErrorControl: " & objItem.ErrorControl
      WScript.Echo "ExitCode: " & objItem.ExitCode
      WScript.Echo "HostName: " & objItem.HostName
      WScript.Echo "ProcessId: " & objItem.ProcessId
      WScript.Echo "ServiceName: " & objItem.ServiceName
      WScript.Echo "SQLServiceType: " & objItem.SQLServiceType
      WScript.Echo "StartMode: " & objItem.StartMode
      WScript.Echo "StartName: " & objItem.StartName
      WScript.Echo "State: " & objItem.State
      WScript.Echo
   Next
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Michiel Wories' WebLog : WMI Samples

How to change the SQL Server password programmatically

Starting with SQL Server 2005 WMI with help of Scriptomatic