Changing a table owner

Question

I\'m trying to change the owner of a table:

sp_changeobjectowner \'OWNER.TABLENAME\', \'dbo\'

But when executing I get the error message:

Answer 1

The correct way to do this in SQL Server 2005 and up is to stop thinking about the prefix as an "owner." The sp_changeobjectowner procedure has been deprecated since SQL Server 2005, and you should instead be using schema DDL, e.g.:

ALTER SCHEMA dbo TRANSFER [current_owner].tablename;

To check the current "owner" (this may return multiple rows if you have more than one tablename in multiple schemas):

SELECT s.name
  FROM sys.schemas AS s
  INNER JOIN sys.tables AS t
  ON s.[schema_id] = t.[schema_id]
  WHERE t.name = N'tablename';

Also be sure that you spell the object correctly. In a case-sensitive collation, for example, TABLENAME and tablename are not the same object, and spelling it with InCorrEcT CaSe could also lead to this error.