Find out SQL user login password

SQL Server Administration
1

We have a test environment that we hardly use but will be going forward.

I am trying to write some ODBC readers in Excel to extract data from the environment but the password I have written down is failing with "login failed for user test_dbo". Test_dbo is the correct user name.

Somewhat frustratingly, at some point in SSMS I must have told it to remember the password so that if I try to connect to the server I am logged right in! Except of course, I have no idea what the password is.

Is there a way to recover the password (I don't want to overwrite it in case there's a process somewhere that relies on it).

2

You should not be able to recover a password from SQL Server as it is salted and hashed.

The following suggests you might be able to recover saved passwords from SSMS with powershell:

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3

Have someone with sysadmin privs do a reset where you have to assign a new password the next time you login.

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