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Effective Permissions In SQL Server

Daniel Hutmacher has a helper procedure to assist you in understanding who has what effective rights on a SQL Server box:

Principals, permissions and securables can all inherit each other. A principal could for instance be a group or a role, and will confer its permissions on to its group/role members. One permission can imply a number of other permissions – SELECT, for instance, requires you to also have VIEW DEFINITION rights to the object. Securables are also arranged in a hierarchy, with the server owning databases, which in turn own schemas that own objects, and so on.

To make things even more complicated, if you have multiple conflicting permissions (DENY and GRANT), the strictest rule applies, meaning that the effective permission is DENY.

Read on to get his procedure.  For my money, the best method to get these details is to query sys.fn_my_permissions() but that requires that you be able to impersonate the user whose permissions you want to see.