A database created by a more recent version of SQL Server cannot be attached or restored to an earlier version. This restriction is simply because an older version cannot know about file format changes that were introduced in the newer release.  If you attempt to attach a database to an earlier version, you will get SQL Server error 948 with the internal version numbers listed in the error message text. For example, the following error occurs if you try to attach a SQL Server 2008 R2 database to a SQL Server 2008 server: ...

This is the first of a series of posts on SQL Server connection strings. I don’t think connection strings are all that complicated but I often see developers have problems because they simply cloned an existing connection string (or found one on the internet) and tweaked it for the task at hand without really understanding what the keywords and values mean. This often results in run-time errors that can be tricky to diagnose.  In this post, I’ll provide a connection string overview and discuss SqlClient connection strings and examples. I’ll discuss OLE DB and ODBC (used via ADO or ADO.NET) and JDBC in more...