The Problem:
SharePoint is, of course, a monster of an application platform with many configuration quirks. As a DBA supporting a content database utilized by a SharePoint environment, I ran across a problem: After installing SharePoint, there is no way for the application administrator to tell the DBA the real database name.
The Reason:
During installation, an alias is created for the database. Unless you write that name down or name the alias something that reflects the database name, there is no clear way to determine the name of the database, either in the application or in the configuration files.
The Solution:
Since the solution was not particularly obvious, I’d like to share it, so that another DBA does not have to solve the issue at the worst possible time: an outage.