There will be some incidents that you need to upgrade Existing SQL Edition to another Such as Standard to Enterprise. in my scenario I had a SharePoint Foundation Farm Installed on a SQL Express 2008 R2 and I needed to upgrade it in to Enterprise due to huge growth of Databases. finally it became crucial while giving me an error when restoring a Database of 50 GB as SQL Express 2008 R2 allowed only 10GB Max and that’s where this upgradement decided.
nothing much to do as you have got the feasibility for this on SQL installer. just take below few steps to complete you Edition upgrade.
1. Run SQL Server Installer Setup from your media.
2. Direct to – Maintenance –> hit on Edition Upgrade
3. Place License Key and click next.
4. Agree to the License Agreements here
5. Select the instance which you need to upgrade as below and click next.
6. Make sure on everything by looking at the summary and hit Next to proceed with upgrading.
7. Give it a moment and you will see the below result as success shortly.
that’s it and your instance is upgraded for selected edition and there will be no harm to Databases or any settings you have done in the instance. Enjoy !
Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure Technical Journal 