Restoring Databases from Enterprise Edition to an enviroment with Standard Edition

I believe it is possible to restore databases from Enterprise edition to an enviroment with Standard edition. We have been able to do it on databases without any partitioned tables. But if a database has partitioned tables it will not start up in the Standard edition after a successful restore. The error log states that the database will not start because partitions are not allowed in Standard edition (which we knew). But we were led to believe that the databases would restore and open fine, the partitions would just not be there in Standard edition. Are we possibly doing something wrong or will this just not work?

Thanks

Chris

This will just not work.

Where did you get your info on partitioned tables in standard edition?

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From a vendor who must not have researched it enough. Thanks

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Chris:

If you have partitioned table in a database that was created using Enterprise Edition, it will fail to attach to the Standard SKU. Unpartitioning a table is an expensive operation and there by cannot be done transparently as part of the restore. What you can do is to restore this database on Developers Edition, remove partitioning, backup the database and then restore on standard.

I was wondering if you can provide more details on your scenario of why you want to migrate your database to Standard SKU. Also, I am curious to find more about your comment 'we were led to believe....' . Is this mentioned in some documentation?

Thanks

Sunil

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It is really a cost saving thing. We are a small company and want to take advantage of the benefits of Enterprise edition in our production environment, but can't afford a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th copy of Enterprise for our test environments. So we wanted to leave our testing enviroments as Standard. This way we could test system functionality and web functionality in an environment where we didn't need partitioning, etc. But we need at times to move the live data down into test at times.

The "led to believe" part came from a third party that we use for some development who said that they had tested this. But they may have been confused. Thanks.

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Ok. One quick observation is that this way you can test for functionality but not for performance because partitioned table will have a different performance profile than the corresponding unpartitioned table.

|||As long as you don't use the test servers in production then you should use developer edition, you need licenses but it is considerably cheaper than standard.