This post shows you how you can migrate or downgrade a SQL Server database from one version to a lower or earlier one. E.g. 2016 to 2014, 2014 to 2012, 2012 to 2008 etc. This can be useful if you maintain a heterogeneous environment of SQL Server instances and you have a backup from a newer version that needs to be hosted onto an older version. This happens to us quite a bit when customers installed a trial on SQL Server Express (latest version) and we need to host it on one our cloud servers.