Why is the data owner unable to alter or delete domains in an Enterprise geodatabase?

Answer

A domain may not be altered by anyone other than its creator; however, domains cannot be applied to, or unapplied from, a field by anyone other than the data owner. Domains cannot be deleted from the geodatabase by anyone other than the domain owner.

If a data owner finds that they are unable to modify domains applied to fields in Enterprise geodatabase feature classes, this may be because domains are owned by the user who created them in the geodatabase and not necessarily by the data owner.

It is recommended that domain creators and data creators be limited to one or two users within a production environment. This enables simpler management of the Enterprise geodatabase.

Note:
The domain owner may be queried through the GDB_Domains table in the SDE repository.