The DEFAULT_SCHEMA clause cannot be used with a Windows group or with principals mapped to certificates or asymmetric keys
Published 13 December 2022
This error occurs when deploying to SQL Server 2008 R2 or earlier, and causes the deployment to fail.
The DEFAULT_SCHEMA clause cannot be used with a Windows group or with principals mapped to certificates or asymmetric keys.
This is because SQL Compare and SQL Packager cannot reliably determine whether a Windows user is an actual user or a group. Windows groups can be mapped to SQL Server users just as Windows users, but in SQL Server 2008 R2 or earlier a default schema cannot be specified for a Windows group. Unfortunately, not specifying a default schema for a Windows user can lead to other problems.
To fix this, note the name of the group in the error dialog, and remove that SQL Server user from the deployment.
