Cannot restore a database with a .bak file due to another SQL server version

Question

I have installed SQL server 2008 R2 and i try to restore a database a colleague sent me in a .bak file.

Unfortunately, i cannot restore the database since the database was saved on a server from version 10.50.1600 and my SQL server version seems to be 10.00.1600.

I tried to upgrade my SQL server with SP1 and SP2 packs but it didn't change anything.

Otherwise, i noticed by clicking on the server property that the line "product" displays Microsoft SQL server Express edition even though i have installed SQL server 2008 R2. That's at least what is displayed when i fire it...

Can anyone help me ?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You CANNOT do this - you cannot attach/detach or backup/restore a database from a newer version (SQL Server 2008 R2 - 10.50.1600) of SQL Server down to an older version (2008 - v10.00.1600) - the internal file structures are just too different to support backwards compatibility.

You can either get around this problem by

• using the same version of SQL Server on all your machines - then you can easily backup/restore databases between instances

• otherwise you can create the database scripts for both structure (tables, view, stored procedures etc.) and for contents (the actual data contained in the tables) either in SQL Server Management Studio (Tasks > Generate Scripts) or using a third-party tool

• or you can use a third-party tool like Red-Gate's SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare to do "diffing" between your source and target, generate update scripts from those differences, and then execute those scripts on the target platform; this works across different SQL Server versions.

Answer 2

Understand, what the version numbers mean. You need to be on R2 which is not just a patch or service-pack.