Unknown SQL Exception 262 and Central Administration

I have been creating a new SharePoint 2010 Farm using guidance from three distinct sources (all of which I highly recommend):

• Todd Klindt’s Service Account Suggestions for SharePoint 2010 – Great guidance for what each account would be used for in a SharePoint 2010 configuration.
• Spence Harbar’s Rational Guide to implementing SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization – My UPS worked correctly on the first try because of this document.
• Shane Young’s How to remove the GUIDs from the SharePoint search service application databases and Search Database GUID issue posts – A very good, step-by-step cheat sheet for removing GUIDs from the Search databases

When I built a non-GUID database for Central Administration, moved the Site Collection over to it, then removed the original “GUID” CA database, everything worked like a champ. Still does, by the way.

I recently did a DB attach to upgrade a Content DB which originally belonged to a 2007 farm. The upgrade also worked like a champ, and I thought it went without error. The ULS, however, disagreed with my assessment – from the ULS log:

Unknown SQL Exception 262 occurred. Additional error information from SQL Server is included below. CREATE TABLE permission denied in database (insert your CA DB name here)

I went online to search for a solution to my issue, and came across a post from Jeremy Jameson – “The workbook cannot be opened” Error with SharePoint Server 2010 (and TFS 2010). Although at first this did not seem to be a related post, I noticed that he had exactly the same SQL error message in the ULS, only he was working with TFS and Excel Services.

So I scanned down the article, and he said to verify that your service account had access to the Content Database. Checking the Central Administration DB, I realized that when I built the new Central Administration DB, I had not granted db_owner access to my application service account (sp_webapp in Todd’s post):

Figure 1 – db_owner role membership not selected

So, there you go. I corrected this by selecting db_owner for the account and am now back in business (my ULS log is much happier).