The best part of learning is by the error messages that each one of you send me over the years. These are a great source of experimentation and a lot of searching to get to the appropriate error resolution. I take this an opportunity to connect with various people and look for active solutions one has achieved from their experience. One of my readers sent an email as shown below about Maintenance Plan Folder Missing Under Management in SQL Server Management Studio:
Hi Pinal,
I have installed SQL Server 2016 for my 3rd party software. Since it’s a financial data, I wanted to make sure that we have backups taken regularly. I read on internet and found that I can created maintenance plan to take backup on scheduled basis. I was surprised to see that I am not having folder called Maintenance Plan. I have tried to repair of management studio and SQL Serve engine, but none of them helped.
Do you have any pointers to fix this weird issue? As you must have imagined that I am not a SQL DBA but a DBA by project demand, so please be generous.
Thanks in advance,
<One of blog Reader>
In my reply to his email I asked for complete snapshot of object explorer and output of select @@version output. Since it was SQL Server 2016, I thought that there is something new. While I was waiting, I tried to think the cause and created a public account in my lab’s SQL Server. But, there is what I saw when I logged it with that account, which was not a Sysadmin.
Yay!! I don’t see SSMS but this is not exactly matching with reader’s SSMS. When I got his reply, things were crystal clear. Here is the output he shared with me for “select @@version”
Microsoft SQL Server 2016 (RTM) – 13.0.1601.5 (X64)
Apr 29 2016 23:23:58
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation
Express Edition (64-bit) on Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter 6.3 (Build 9600: ) (Hypervisor)
This was an EXPRESS edition of SQL Server. Since there is no SQL Agent with SQL Server, there is no point of scheduling and hence no maintenance plan folder.
To summarize, there could be 2 reasons which I could find.
- Logged in account not having sysadmin permissions. Below query would return 0.
SELECT IS_SRVROLEMEMBER('sysadmin')
- Express edition of SQL Server. Below query would say express edition
SELECT SERVERPROPERTY('Edition')
Do you know any other reason? Please share via comments. I am sure this will be a learning for me too about SQL Server Management Studio.
Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)
First appeared on SQL SERVER – Maintenance Plan Folder Missing Under Management in SQL Server Management Studio