Putting this here in case anyone else runs into this nasty bug…

Was configuring Service Bus for Windows Server (The on premise version of Azure Service Bus) for a client and was getting a bunch of errors during the configuration phase.

“An object or column name is missing or empty. For SELECT INTO statements, verify each column has a name. For other statements, look for empty alias names. Aliases defined as "" or [] are not allowed. Change the alias to a valid name.”

Basically a meaningless random SQL error. My first reaction was that it was because we had a Availability Group SQL listener in front of the main SQL node…but that was a red herring.

What it actually was was we were using an Admin Group name like “Service Bus Admins – UAT”. It was correct as per AD and passed validation in the configuration wizard but blew up at the creating database stage of the configuration process.

I ask the Active Directory Admin to change the name to “ServiceBusAdmins_UAT” and it worked like a charm.

It was either the spaces or the hyphen that SQL didn’t like.