Were there any changes in this area with SQL Server 2014? I’ve seen this post Is it possible to restore Sql Server 2008 backup in sql server 2005 and I know that this was not possible as a scenario for 2012 -> 2008 but I wonder if MS made any changes here with the 2014 version.
We are evaluating 2014 version and we have a fairly large database in testing. We’d like to restore a backup of that database to SQL Server 2008 because that physical machine has more space, RAM,…
I’m getting standard error message when I try to restore backup but I was wondering if there is something else in SQL Server 2014 that I might be missing.
Not really as far as I know but here are couple things you can try.
Third party tools: Create empty database on 2008 instance and use third party tools such as ApexSQL Diff and Data Diff to synchronize schema and tables.
Just use these (or any other on the market such as Red Gate, Idera, Dev Art, there are many similar) in trial mode to get the job done.
Generate scripts: Go to Tasks -> Generate Scripts, select option to script the data too and execute it on 2008 instance. Works just fine but note that script order is something you must be careful about. By default scripts are not ordered to take dependencies into account.
This tools doeasn't support sql server 2014 :(
You can use Generate Scripts from Sql Server 2014. Be sure and carefully review/edit the script. I just did this, and had to edit the path where the data and log files are created, and remove creation of users (which I could have suppressed as an option while generating the script).
An open source option for synchronizing databases is OpenDBDiff.