Mathew Nolton Blog

I think you are missing a closing </font> tag on your post.

your right phil. sorry bloggers.

It's likely that you installed Reporting Services, which includes a hotfix that has been known to cause this behavior. Here is a longer explaination I wrote a couple weeks ago after our local SQL SIG meeting:

At tonight's meeting, I mentioned that a possible side effect of installing the hotfix required for installation of Reporting Services may be that you can no longer edit table schemas with Enterprise Manager. Although the laptop demo did not reproduce the issue, there are a few people on the web who have had similar experiences (see quotes below). The fix for the problem, should you encounter it, is to install hotfix 878 or higher. At this moment, however, hotfix 878 has not been regression tested by Microsoft and therefore obtaining it requires a call to the Microsoft help line at (800) 936-5800. Depending on call volume, the hold time on this line has been reported to be upward of three hours, so schedule out your afternoon accordingly! :)

1. More information about this bug on www.aspfaq.com:
http://www.aspfaq.com/show.asp?id=2515

2. Brief discussion of the problem on www.sqlservercentral.com (registration required)
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?messageid=105467

3. User experience #1 from Google Groups

"I have a sql 2000 sp3a box that is giving me some trouble. when I attempt to
modify and save a table through enterprise manager I get an error like this:

'some' table
- Unable to modify table.
ODBC error: [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver] Invalid cursor state

This seems to be server wide on all databases and occurs when trying to
remove indentity property, change an existing data type or modify field
length. ... I believe the problem occured while trying to
get sql 2000 reporting services installed and I applied a sql 2000 hotfix
SQL2000-KB810185-8.00.0859-ENU.exe do you know how i can rollback this
hotfix?

4. User experience #2 from Google Groups:

I am trying to make design changes to a SQL table i just created and I keep
getting this error:

'Drug_Alcohol' table
- Unable to modify table.
ODBC error: [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Invalid cursor state

... I forgot to mention that we also installed Reporting Services on the 2003 server on the 29th. I e-mailed this question to MS and they didn't think that installation caused this problem. I can't find a cross-reference to determine how the 2003 server got 8.00.859, so I suspect this is due to installing Reporting Services. I'm doubting whether uninstalling Reporting Services would get that server back to 8.00.760.

By the way, MS has no KB article on this bug as far as I know. And, if you call that MS help line I mentioned in the post, they will insist that the hoxfix does not fix the problem you are describing. But trust me, it does...

Thanks Michael,
I will try re-installing sqlserver to see if i can get rid of reporting services.
-Mathew Nolton

Take Outs for 21 May 2004