How to transfer the ownership of the dbo schema in SQL Server 2012 I've accidentally given a user the ownership of the db_owner schema (using the check box in the UI as below) and now I cannot:


Transfer ownership to another user
Drop the user from DB (though I can delete login in the SQL Server)


I tried The database principal owns a schema in the database, and cannot be dropped.

ALTER AUTHORIZATION ON SCHEMA::db_owner TO dbo


And while it completed successfully, the user still has ownership, and it's greyed out so I can't seem to do it in the UI either.



Found a solution:

In addition to Arron's answer, I realised that I'd run the above command in wrong DB (facepalm!). Once the DB had been corrected both the above SQL and the answer below worked.
Slightly different approach would be to give the schema back to the original owner/schema, instead of to dbo:

ALTER AUTHORIZATION ON SCHEMA::db_owner TO db_owner;