There may be times where it might be helpful to gather the ID of the person or application that is interacting with the data or objects in your database.
Maybe you are trying to audit changes to your data, or maybe you want to get a better idea of how the data is being queried.
The SUSER_SNAME() system function
The SUSER_SNAME() system function quite simply returns the login name for the current security context.
We can call it very simply:
SELECT SUSER_SNAME() AS TheUser
Understand that if we have the Security Identification Number (SID) of a user, we can pass that value as an argument to the function, and it will return to us the login name of the person associated with that ID. Here’s an example:
SELECT SUSER_SNAME(0x7535000777000a067df7ebs4c909abe2020) AS WhoIsThis
(That ID is completely bogus, but in real life, a person’s security ID would look similar to that)
Also understand that if you pass a security ID that doesn’t exist, NULL will be returned.
Next Steps:
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Here’s a link to the official Microsoft article that talks about SUSER_SNAME()
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