April 8, 2015 at 1:57 pm
Hello, what are the SS rules around forwards compatibility? For example, I have a SS2014 DB instance but I'm able to query it through SSMS2012 Express. Also, I backed up a SS2012 database and restored it into a SS2014 instance which works as expected. Should I also be able to back up a SS2014 instance that was restored from SS2012 and restore it into a separate SS2012 instance?
April 8, 2015 at 2:21 pm
You can connect with SSMS to any version of SQL Server (AFAIK), but you might be missing some options due to compability.
You can restore a backup from 2 previous versions, but you can't restore a backup from a newer version.
April 8, 2015 at 3:13 pm
You can't go down with the backups. 2014 has a different file structure than 2012 which has a different one from 2008R2, etc.
As Luis said, some functionality will work from older versions of SSMS, but it's limited. I haven't tried it, but I'll be solid money you can't connect to a 2014 instance from the 2000 version of Management Studio. However, for the ones you can connect on, the query window will work fine. It's everything else that's likely to break. I haven't tried connecting to 2005 from 2014, but I know you can connect to 2008, 2008R2 & 2012.
For the most part, for the best functionality, have the latest version installed and connect down. While you may be able to connect up, you're going to run into issues.
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