[sql-server] Cannot find the object because it does not exist or you do not have permissions. Error in SQL Server

I have a database and have a Sql script to add some fields to a table called "Products" in the database.

But when i am executing this script, I am getting the following error:

Cannot find the object "Products" because it does not exist or you do not have permissions

Why is the error occurring and what should I do to resolve it?

This could a permission issue. The user needs at least ALTER permission to truncate a table. Another option is to call DELETE FROM instead of TRUNCATE TABLE, but this operation is slower because it writes to the Log file, whereas TRUNCATE does not write to the log file.

The minimum permission required is ALTER on table_name. TRUNCATE TABLE permissions default to the table owner, members of the sysadmin fixed server role, and the db_owner and db_ddladmin fixed database roles, and are not transferable. However, you can incorporate the TRUNCATE TABLE statement within a module, such as a stored procedure, and grant appropriate permissions to the module using the EXECUTE AS clause.

Sharing my case, hope that will help.

In my situation inside MY_PROJ.Database->MY_PROJ.Database.sqlproj I had to put this:

<Build Include="dbo\Tables\MyTableGeneratingScript.sql" />

I found a reason why this would happen. The user had the appropriate permissions, but the stored procedure included a TRUNCATE statement:

TRUNCATE TableName

Since TRUNCATE deletes items without logging, you (apparently) need elevated permissions to execute a stored procedure that contains it. We changed the statement to:

DELETE FROM TableName

...and the error went away!

It can also happen due to a typo in referencing a table such as [dbo.Product] instead of [dbo].[Product].

In my case the sql server version on my localhost is higher than that on the production server and hence some new variables were added to the generated script from the localhost. This caused errors in creating the table in the first place. Since the creation of the table failed, subsequent query on the "NON EXISITING" table also failed. Luckily, in among the long list of the sql errors, I found this "OPTIMIZE_FOR_SEQUENTIAL_KEY = OFF" to be the new varialbe in the script causing my issue. I did a search and replace and the error went away. Hope it helps someone.

Does the user you're executing this script under even see that table??

select top 1 * from products

Do you get any output for this??

If yes: does this user have the permission to modify the table, i.e. execute DDL scripts like ALTER TABLE etc.? Typically, regular users don't have this elevated permissions.

The TRUNCATE statement was my first problem, glad to find the solution here. But I was using SSIS and trying to load data from another database, and it failed with the same error on any table that used IDENTITY to create an auto-incrementing ID. If I was scripting it myself I'd first need to use the command SET IDENTITY_INSERT tablename ON, and then SET IDENTITY_INSERT tablename OFF when the table update was done. But this requires ALTER permissions on the table, which I do not have. Hence the error message in SSIS on the table load (even though the previous step had just deleted all the data out of the table.)

You can right click the procedure, choose properties and see which permissions are granted to your login ID. You can then manually check off the "Execute" and alter permission for the proc.

Or to script this it would be:

GRANT EXECUTE ON OBJECT::dbo.[PROCNAME]
    TO [ServerInstance\user];

GRANT ALTER ON OBJECT::dbo.[PROCNAME]
    TO [ServerInstance\user];

It could also be possible that you have created the "Products" in your login schema and you were trying to execute the same in a different schema (probably dbo)

Steps to resolve this issue

1)open the management studio 2) Locate the object in the explorer and identify the schema under which your object is? ( it is the text before your object name ). In the image below its the "dbo" and my object name is action status

if you see it like "yourcompanydoamin\yourloginid" then you should you can modify the permission on that specific schema and not any other schema.

you may refer to "Ownership and User-Schema Separation in SQL Server"

Look for any DDL operation in the script. Maybe the user does not have access rights to run changes.

In my case it was SET IDENTITY_INSERT tblTableName ON

You can either add db_ddladmin for the whole database or for just the table to solve this issue (or change the script)

-- give the non-ddladmin user INSERT/SELECT as well as ALTER:
GRANT ALTER, INSERT, SELECT ON dbo.tblTableName TO user_name;

In my case I was running under a different user than the one I was expecting.

I had 'DRIVER={SQL Server};SERVER=...;DATABASE=...;Trusted_Connection=false;User Id=XXX;Password=YYY' as the connection string I passed to pypyodbc.connect(), but the connection was still using the credentials of the Windows user that ran the script (I verified this using the SQL Server Profiler and by trying an invalid uid/password combination - which didn't result in an expected error).

I decided not to dig into this further, since switching to this better way of connecting fixed the issue:

conn = pypyodbc.connect(driver='{SQL Server}', server='servername', database='dbname', uid='userName', pwd='Password')

I've been trying to copy a table from PROD to DEV but get an error: "Cannot find the object X because it does not exist or you do not have permissions."

However, the table did exist, and I was running as sa so I did have permissions.

The problem was actually with CONTRAINTS. I'd renamed the table on DEV to be old_XXX months ago. But when I tried to copy the original one over from PROD, the Defaut Constraint names clashed.

The error message was misleading