This is a fantastic blog post from my dear friend Balmukund ( blog | twitter | facebook ). He had presented a fantastic session in our last UG and there were lots of requests from attendees that he blogs about it. Well, here is the blog post about the same very popular UG session. Let us read the entire blog post in the voice of the Balmukund himself.

During my last session in SQL Bangalore User Group (Facebook) meeting, I was lucky enough to deliver a session on SQL Server Startup issue. The name of the session was “SQL Engine Starting Trouble – How to start?” From the feedback, I realized that one of the “not well known” startup parameter is “-m”. Okay, you might say “I know that this is used to start the SQL in single user mode”. But what you might not know is that you can pass a string with -m which has special meaning and use. I have used this parameter in my blog here but looks like not many of you have seen that.

It happens most of the time when we want to start SQL Server in single user mode, someone else makes connection before you can. The only choice you have is to repeat same process again till you succeed. Some smart DBAs may disable the remote network protocols (TCP/IP and Named Pipes) of SQL Instance and allow only local connections to SQL. Once the activity is complete, our dear smart DBA has to remember to re-enable network protocols. Sometimes, it may be a local service or application getting connection to SQL before we can. There is a better way to deal with it. Yes, you have guessed it correctly: -m parameter which a string.

Since I work with SQL Product Support team, I may know little more undocumented commands and parameters, but this is not an undocumented stuff. It’s already documented in books online. So in this blog, I am going to show a demo of its usage. As documentation shows, “Do not use this option as a security feature.” So please read this blog as knowledge enhancer and troubleshooting issues not security feature.

In my laptop, I have a default instance of SQL Server 2012 and here is what we would in the configuration manager.

Now, I would go ahead and stop SQL Service by selecting SQL Server (MSSQLServer) > Right Click > Stop. There are multiple ways to start SQL with startup parameter.

1) Use Net Start Command from command prompt

Net Start MSSQLServer /mSQLCMD

The above command is the simplest way to add startup parameter to SQL. This parameter would be cleared once we stop and start SQL.

2) Add Startup Parameter via configuration manager. Step is already listed here. We need to add -mSQLCMD

If we compare 1 and 2, it’s clear that unless we modify startup parameter and remove -m, it would be in effect.

3) Start SQL Service via command line

SQLServr.exe –mSQLCMD –s<InstanceName>

Wait, what does SQLCMD mean with /m? It’s the instruction to SQL that start SQL Server in Single User Mode and allow only the application which is SQLCMD. Any other application would fail with Login Failed for User Error message. It would be important to note that string is case sensitive. This value should be picked up from application_name column from sys.dm_exec_sessions. I have made a connection using SQLCMD and as we can see it comes as upper case “SQLCMD”.

If we want only management studio query windows to connect then we need to give
-m” Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio – Query” as startup parameter.

In below example, I have given it as SQLCMd (lower case d at the end) and we would notice that we would not be able to connect to SQL Instance.

Above proves that parameter works as expected and it’s case sensitive. Error Log would show below information. How to get error log location? I have already blogged about it.

Hope you have learned something new.

Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)