Have you ever encountered the error message “The job failed. Unable to determine if the owner of job has server access” while executing a SQL Agent job? If so, you’re not alone. In this blog post, we will discuss this error and provide a solution to fix it.

The error message indicates that the job owner does not have access to the SQL Server instance. This can happen if the user who originally created the job no longer has the necessary permissions. In the example mentioned, the user was deleted from the Active Directory, causing the error to occur.

One possible workaround to fix this error is to update the job owner. However, there is a caveat with this approach. If the job is part of a maintenance plan, modifying the owner through the SQL Server Management Studio may overwrite the setting when the maintenance plan is edited and saved.

To avoid this issue, we can modify the owner of the maintenance plan using T-SQL. Here is an example:

USE MSDB
GO
UPDATE sysssispackages
SET ownersid = SUSER_SID('sa')
WHERE NAME = 'Name Of Maint Plan'

In the above code, we are updating the owner of the maintenance plan to ‘sa’, which is a system administrator account. By making this change and saving the plan again, the job should execute successfully.

It is worth noting that using the ‘sa’ account as the owner can be a good practice in certain scenarios. The ‘sa’ account has full administrative privileges and can take care of all security issues. However, it is important to use caution and ensure that the ‘sa’ account is properly secured.

Do you know any other solutions to fix this error? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments section below.