I ran into a rather obscure permissions problem the other day. Since I wasn’t able to figure it out on my own I posted for help. This wasn’t something I felt could be easily translated into #sqlhelp so I went ahead and posted it on Stack Exchange then tweeted the link, with a brief description, on #sqlhelp.

Basically I needed to know what permissions were required to see the row counts in the Object Explorer Details tab. Yes, I’m aware of a number of different ways to get the row count of a table, however this was a client request and they specifically wanted to use the OE Details tab.

And simply enough the answer was VIEW DATABASE STATE. In hindsight this makes some sense as this permission gives you access to a number of DMVs (Database Management Views) that even read access at the database level doesn’t.

Thanks Ernest Libertucci (twitter)! I really appreciate the help!