Challenge:

When you try to view your SharePoint site and receive the error message, "Cannot connect to the configuration database," how do you resolve the problem?

 

Solution

On the server farm, SharePoint connects to SQL Server through a domain account, so checking the network and user in AD are the most important things you need to do first. Never assume that everything is working correctly on the server farm; the "cannot connect to the configuration database" error is most often a result of an issue with the domain user account.

Follow these step to check whether the domain user account is working correctly or not.

Assume that the domain account which is used to connect to the configuration database is "MyDomainsqlaccount."

After running the SharePoint configuration wizard, this account is added into some groups in User People & Groups. Let's check your account on that.

Go to Run and type compmgmt.msc then press Enter. When the Computer Management window opens, expand the User People & Groups node, and click the Groups item on the tree. On the right-hand side, all groups will be listed, so double-click on the group named "WSS_ADMIN_WPG," and you will see an account like:

 

Sometimes, you will see this:

 

Yes, the account which is needed to connect to the database is not working correctly, which is triggering the error message. The good news is that to solve this problem, you don't need to change or reconfigure anything on your server farm, or on any server which has joined the farm. Just remove the server which hosted Central Admin out of your domain, join it to your domain again, and everything will be solved.

Good luck to you.

 

Notes

• This issue occurs often on a server which has been newly added to the domain. If you are working on a single SharePoint Server, you can check out the following Microsoft KBs in the "See Also" section below.
• This issue, and the fix described above, is not specific to SharePoint 2010 sites, but applies to all instances of SharePoint.

 

See Also:

• You receive a "Cannot connect to the configuration database" error message when you connect to your Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 Web site (Microsoft Support)
• You receive an "Unable to connect to database" error message when you install SharePoint Portal Server 2003 or Windows SharePoint Services (Microsoft Support)