I found a blog very interesting on www.sqlskills.com which talks about migrating databases among various versions of SQL Server. It’s very common these days for an organisation to run multiple versions of SQL Server to lower down costs on licences. Moving databases to lower versions can be a painful task if any version specific functionality or features are not supported.

Thanks to Microsoft to provide a DMV ‘sys.dm_db_persisted_sku_features ‘ to tell features belonging to specific version.

Source: http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/post/SQL-Server-2008-Does-my-database-contain-Enterprise-only-features.aspx

Find SQL Server instances on local network

on command prompt: run

c:\ > osql -L


another way is to run from powershell, open "powershell ise" and run as administrator

now run command

[System.Data.Sql.SqlDataSourceEnumerator]::Instance.GetDataSources()

it will give information as following

ServerName InstanceName IsClustered Version
---------- ------------ ----------- -------