A client of Comprehensive Database Performance Health Check, recently send me an email after reading best practices about username and logins in SQL Server. Let us discuss today why Renaming distributor_admin Bad Idea.

My client was doing a security audit of their system and they ended up finding a few usernames and logins which they were not using or familiar with. One of the accounts they found was distributor_admin. This account had sysadmin rights. They wanted to rename it as they found in their error log failed access to login via this account. Here is my suggestion.

One should not rename this account as it is a system account and there may be some dependency if you have already set up replication. If you do not have replication, you can easily disable this account. If you have replication, you can change the configuration of this account in such a way that it only has access to create linked servers and not the system admin or owner.

It is not a good idea to rename any system objects or account and in particular Renaming distributor_admin Bad Idea. However, this advice does not apply to SA account. You can always rename your SA account and here is the blog post for the same: Can Admin Rename SA Account in SQL Server? – Interview Question of the Week #256.

If you have any questions, you can always reach out to me on Twitter.

Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)