"An error has occurred while accessing the SQL Server database or the Office SharePoint Server Search service. If this is the first time you have seen this message, try again later. If this problem persists, contact your administrator.”

I recently had an interesting issue where we were getting the following errors accessing the User Profiles and properties link within SSP.

“An error has occurred while accessing the SQL Server database or the Office SharePoint Server Search service. If this is the first time you have seen this message, try again later. If this problem persists, contact your administrator.”

Notice in the below picture that the schedule fields are blank.

When accessing “Configure Profile Import”, you will see the following error:

An error has occurred while accessing the SQL Server database or the Office SharePoint Server Search service. If this is the first time you have seen this message, try again later. If this problem persists, contact your administrator.

Also, within the Configure Profile Import page, you will see the following error within Incremental Import Schedule & Full Import Schedule:

“Unable to obtain schedule information. Please verify that the job server is up and connected to the farm.”

As a result, profile imports are unable to be scheduled.

This can happen when one of the hidden SSP timer jobs is deleted via pwoershell command (stsadm –o deletessptimerjobs) or accidentally while mis-handling the server re-boot hierarchy. Specifically in this case, the User Profile Incremental Import Job timer job was missing accidentally while mis-handling the server re-boot hierarchy.

 You can run the following from the bin directory to validate the missing one of the SSP timer jobs.

stsadm –o enumssptimerjobs –title “nameofssp”

SSP Timer Job Id="d29a1e4b-268d-4bb8-90b9-003935407f6b" Display Name="User Profile Change Job"
SSP Timer Job Id="80395702-10aa-46bb-91f8-014bedaf7184" Display Name="Audience Compilation Job"
SSP Timer Job Id="3565824b-d79a-4b5e-9af9-06653c8564b0" Display Name="User Profile Full Import Job"
SSP Timer Job Id="a7e410e3-abdf-4833-b9fe-a2e8b2863182" Display Name="Distribution List Import Job"
SSP Timer Job Id="1fad8b5e-6b2b-48f3-ae79-aa17afb5ca11" Display Name="User Profile Change Cleanup Job"
SSP Timer Job Id="1zfl8b5a-9g3g-59q9-wr41-mm22afb7kia1" Display Name="User Profile Incremental Import Job"

In this particular case, the User Profile Incremental Import Job was missing. Unfortunately, the only supported resolution is creating a new SSP or restoring the SSP from backup. I've seen some external public documentation suggesting a fix which includes directly editing the associated SharePoint SSP database. Please be aware that any direct edits to the database is strictly unsupported by Microsoft.