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I have a SQL Server 2005 database that has been deleted, and I need to discover who deleted it. Is there a way of obtaining this user name?

Thanks, MagicAndi.

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@Evan, This is NOT an ass-kicking exercise! In my enlightened company, we will offer the offending user an intense period of 're-education'. If that doesn't work, it time for the baseball bats... – MagicAndi Jun 29 '09 at 15:13
+1 for using a cousin of a clue-by-four, still the most effective re-education process on the planet today. – Avery Payne Jun 29 '09 at 17:45
@MagicAndi - Sorry-- just couldn't resist adding the tag after remembering it on the "Who dropped a table" question a couple of weeks back. smile – Evan Anderson Jun 29 '09 at 18:31
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Is ass kicking really necessary? While it was a bad mistake, it was a mistake. Restore the backup. If one doesn't have a backup, perhaps the ass kicking should be refocused in to a backup and recovery model... – Frank V Jul 7 '09 at 16:03
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4 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

If it's not there in the default trace still, see my answer to kind-of this question on ServerFault a couple of weeks ago at Is there any way to determine who dropped a table?. It links to a blog post I wrote for 2000, 2005, 2008 to find out when a table was dropped and who did it - you could adapt it for a database too. Checkout my blog post at Finding out who dropped a table using the transaction log.

Hope this helps!

PS Checkout DDL Triggers as a way to prevent this happening in future.

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up vote 2 down vote

You might check the Schema Changes History under Standard Reports.

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up vote 1 down vote

Did you checked the sql logs?

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up vote 0 down vote

If you want to pay for it, there are a couple of products (Apex Log is one) that will read the transaction log (or log backups) and get information like this back.

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