>Being a lazy guy that I always am, I try to find ways to make my life easier. When we finished fixing all the issues in our test server, I recommended that we simply backup the MSDB database and restore it on the production server. This way, I don’t have to recreate the jobs on the production server. Well, that’s just what hapened. I didn’t have to recreate the jobs. Unfortunately, I had a database maintenance plan which I created in the test server and that got in my production server as well. I needed to either modify the maintenance plan to point to the correct server – which is my production server – or delete it and recreate another. I tried the easiest path – deleting the maintenance plan. When I did that, it was throwing me an error similar to the one below

TITLE: Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio
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Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. (mscorlib)
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections.(provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 – Could not open a connection to SQL Server) (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 53)

I checked the maintenance plan and verified the connections and saw that it was the instance name of my test server. I checked the SQL Server logs on my test server and noticed that my production server’s SQL Server service account was trying to connect. Good thing I applied best practice here or I would end up deleting the database maintenance plan on the test server from the production server. So, how do I do it? The workaround is to check the dbo.sysmaintplan_plans table of the MSDB database. The ID column can be used as a value for us to delete records in the dbo.sysmaintplan_log, dbo.sysmaintplan_subplans and dbo.sysmaintplan_plans tables. Once those records have been deleted, you can refresh your Maintenance Plans folder in SQL Server Management Studio and notice the maintenance plans disappear. This does not delete the jobs created by these maintenance plans. You still have to manually delete those jobs.