Getting All Permissions for Server

We recently had to work out a way to fetch and display all effective permissions granted to our Production SQL Server. I had been required to get all permissions at the DB level before, but even then that tended to be more granular and only showed to what roles you belonged and what explicit permissions you’d been granted. We wanted to run something through a loop of all users and get that information into a report. It turns out this was easier than I’d expected, especially after my first attempts to dig through the system tables.

We used a script something like the following:

EXECUTE as login = ‘DomainName\Login’;
select ‘DomainName\Login’ AS Login, * from fn_my_permissions (NULL, ‘SERVER’);
REVERT;

With a little work this can be used within PowerShell or SQL to loop through all logins and capture the information in a table or report.

The function could also be used to loop through all databases by using the database and then substituting Database for Server above:

USE AdventureWorks2012;
EXECUTE as login = ‘DomainName\Login’;
SELECT ‘DomainName\Login’, * FROM fn_my_permissions (NULL, ‘DATABASE’);
REVERT;

For an interesting take on revamping sp_msforeachdb, check out this script from Edward Pollack (t). It might help you if you need to loop through all of your databases to run something like this for your auditors.