Configuring a SharePoint 2010 Installation (part 1) - Renaming the Central Administration Database

12/9/2010 2:52:20 PM

2. Renaming the Central Administration Database

After the SharePoint configuration database, the Central Administration database is the second most important database that SharePoint uses, and unless you perform a command-line installation, it uses the default user name with a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID). This can make it challenging if you want to write scripts that reference the database using the default name. The following steps should be used with extreme caution, but if you follow them exactly, you can give the default Central Administration database a more user-friendly name.

Log on to your SQL Server with an account that has full access; ideally, you should use the same account that you used for your SharePoint installation.
Open the SQL Server Management Studio interface and locate the SQL Server instance that contains your Central Administration database. The database name will be something similar to SharePoint_AdminContent_<GUID>, as shown in Figure 6. Right-click the database name and choose the Rename command from the shortcut menu to enter edit mode. Then press Ctrl+C to copy the existing name of the database for later use. Click anywhere outside of the database name to exit edit mode.
Note:

Be sure not to change the name at this point—it will be done at a later time.

Figure 6. Finding the default Central Administration database name
While still in SQL Server Management Studio, back up the existing SharePoint_AdminContent_<GUID> database by right-clicking the name of the database and then selecting the Tasks command. Select Back Up to open the Back Up Database dialog box. Use all of the default settings for the backup and then click OK.
When you have successfully backed up the database, restore the information from the backup that you just performed to a new database having a user-friendly database name such as CentralAdmin_Content_DB. Perform the restore by right-clicking the existing database name again and selecting the Tasks command from the shortcut menu. Select Restore and then Database to open the Restore Database dialog box shown in Figure 7 . In the To Database section, type in the new database name and then click OK at the bottom of the dialog box.

Figure 7. Restoring to a new database name
Open Central Administration. Under Application Management, click Manage Content Databases.
1. Select the SharePoint Central Administration v4 Web application using the Web application drop-down list.
2. Click the old database name, SharePoint_AdminContent_<GUID>.
3. Use the Database status drop-down option to change the status from Ready to Offline.
4. Do not select the option to remove the content database.
5. Click OK.
Note:

It is critical that you use the correct user name during this step or you will probably receive Access Denied error messages.
Log on to the server using the account that was used to provision the database. Usually this is the service user account that you configured SharePoint with when you provisioned the content databases during the installation of SharePoint 2010.
After opening the command prompt, perform the following steps.
1. Type cd C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web server extensions\14\BIN\ to change the directory to the SharePoint 2010 root so you can run the STSADM commands.
2. Delete the original Central Administration database, the one with the GUID that you copied earlier, using the following command (be sure to specify the UrlOfYourCentralAdministration and NamedInstanceOfYourSqlServer for your SharePoint installation names).
  stsadm -o deletecontentdb -url http://UrlOfYourCentralAdministration:p
  ortnumber -databasename SharePoint_AdminContent_<GUID> -databaseserver
  NamedInstanceOfYourSqlServer or just the name of the SQL Server if there is no
  instance name for the SQL Server.
3. Associate the newly created database with your Central Administration using the following STSADM command (again be sure to specify the UrlOfCentralYourAdministration and NamedInstanceOfYourSqlServer for your SharePoint installation names).
  stsadm -o addcontentdb -url http:// UrlOfYourCentralAdministration:
  portnumber -databasename SharePoint_AdminContent_DB -databaseserver
  NamedInstanceOfYourSqlServer
Return to Central Administration. Under Application Management, click Manage Content Databases and refresh the page to verify that your Central Administration database reflects the new database name as shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8. Renaming the Central Administration database

If you see a database with the new name, you can then be sure that the original Central Administration database is backed up, and you can delete it from SQL Server.

Note:

If you attempt to delete the original SharePoint_AdminContent_<GUID> database and receive an error indicating there are existing connections to the database, you probably didn’t disassociate the database from SharePoint. Repeat the process from the beginning.