Error: Invalid object name 'umbracoUser', a possible reason – DB Schemas

When I moved my site the other day I got struck by the really annoying error:

Server Error in '/umbraco' Application.
Invalid object name 'umbracoUser'.

I tried running the installer again as some old forum posts suggested to no avail…

When I looked in the database I noticed that (almost) all tables had been prefixed with the DB username "wb_umbdb_sql" I used when I once installed the site:

This got me thinking about - Schemas!

Simply put a Schema is used to group tables together and define a structure within a database (I might have gotten this all wrong since I never use Schemas…)

Anyway, the default Schema assigned to a DB user affects this user's ability to see different database tables, you might think of Schemas as a filter in this case.

My new DB user was assigned the Default Schema "dbo". When I changed this to the same schema that prefixed most of my tables the error disappeared!
(It's possible that I would have been enough to just add both the dbo and the wb_umbdb_sql schema, but this is what I did…)

Above you can see that the user now is assigned to the Default Schema (with the strange name) "wb_umbdb_sql", she (the user) is also the owner of this Schema as well as a maber of the db_owner role. Thanks to this she can see both the schema wb_umbdb_sql and dbo.

The dialog above is found in SQL Server Management Studio via YourDB >> Security >> Users >> Properties (right click).

I hope that this short tutorial will help anyone else that might encounter the same issue as I did.

// Kalle