Activating Trial Edition of SQL Server 2005

I have the following situation.
I installed a couple of months ago SQL Server 2005 Trial Edition which is En
teprise Edition I guess.

Currently I am testing replication on our company database.
Now. In a few months the Trial Version will expire.


Can I avoid setting up my Merge Replication again and re-installing everythi
ng from scratch?
Is there a way to activate NOT YET expired trial version ?

More to that I prefer to purchase the Standard Ed. which is less expensive t
han Enterprise.

Can I convert somehow the Trial Enteprise ed. into Standard WITHOUT having t
o re-install everything and possibly losing oall my settings.

Issue a select @@version to determine what you are running. I think your
best bet is to script our your publications and subscribers, and then to
detacth the databases. Remove the trial version and install standard noting
that web synchronization and other features of merge replication present
only in EE will not be available.

Then run the publication and subscription scripts on the new server.

--
Hilary Cotter
Director of Text Mining and Database Strategy
RelevantNOISE.Com - Dedicated to mining blogs for business intelligence.

This posting is my own and doesn't necessarily represent RelevantNoise's
positions, strategies or opinions.

Looking for a SQL Server replication book?
http://www.nwsu.com/0974973602.html

Looking for a FAQ on Indexing Services/SQL FTS
http://www.indexserverfaq.com



"Yuri" <Yuri@tester.de> wrote in message
news:5o- dnaz5Doik2dvYnZ2dnUV
Z8qKdnZ2d@giganews.com...
>I have the following situation.
> I installed a couple of months ago SQL Server 2005 Trial Edition which is
> Enteprise Edition I guess.
>
> Currently I am testing replication on our company database.
> Now. In a few months the Trial Version will expire.
>
>
> Can I avoid setting up my Merge Replication again and re-installing
> everything from scratch?
> Is there a way to activate NOT YET expired trial version ?
>
> More to that I prefer to purchase the Standard Ed. which is less expensive
> than Enterprise.
>
> Can I convert somehow the Trial Enteprise ed. into Standard WITHOUT having
> to re-install everything and possibly losing oall my settings.

Hi Hillary,

thanks for your piece of advice.
This is actually a workaround solution.

Your are right, installing the Standard ed. over Trial Version isn't probabl
y the best idea.

But I guess you are mistaken saying that SE has no Web Merge Replication fea
utures

Look at this table:  http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodin...
es.mspx


Yuri