John McCormack DBA

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Upgrading from SQL Server evaluation edition to enterprise edition

20th September 2016 By John McCormack Leave a Comment

Upgrading from SQL Server evaluation edition to enterprise edition

This 5 minute guide shows how to simply upgrade from SQL Server Evaluation edition to Enterprise edition. It’s very easy but I didn’t think it was intuitive. I spent a quite a while clicking around all the menu items at the top of management studio (SSMS) only to find I was looking in completely the wrong place. There’s a bit more to it than simply updating the product key.

How do you do it?

When it comes to upgrading from evaluation edition of SQL Server to enterprise edition, you are actually doing an edition upgrade so you need to go back to your installation media and run setup.exe.

Select Maintenance from the left hand side menu and then click on Edition Upgrade. From here, it’s a case of following the GUI. (I’ve also added some more detailed steps underneath if you need them)

SQL Server edition upgrade

When presented with a radio box in the product key page, your choices are Specify a free edition or Enter the product key. Click on the Enter the product key button and type in your product key. Click Next >

enter sql server product key

Accept the license terms and click Next >

accept sql server license terms

Select an instance to be upgraded from the drop down list and then click Next >. I had a default and named instance on this server so these had to be done 1 at a time.

specify instance of sql server to modify

Review the list of features that will be upgraded and click Upgrade

ready to upgrade sql server 2016 edition

Wait for the GUI to confirm your edition upgrade has worked and click Close.

edition upgrade completed for sql server 2016

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Filed Under: front-page, Guides

About John McCormack

John McCormack is an experienced SQL DBA with extensive knowledge of the two largest public clouds: AWS and Azure.

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