This article will describe the steps to upgrade a SQL Server 2014 Express to Standard. Since the release of 2008 R2 it is quite simplified to do this kind of edition upgrades and it is almost the same for every version after 2008 R2. Before that version, you needed to start the setup with “SKUUPGRADE=1”, the command in older versions is:

setup.exe SKUUPGRADE=1

Here I’ll show the steps to perform an edition upgrade from SQL Server 2014 Express to Standard.

  1. First start the SQL Server 2014 installer, click on the maintenance tab and here you see the option “Edition Upgrade”, launch this option.
  2. After launching the “Edition Upgrade” option, you’ll see a new window that SQL Server 2014 Setup is processes the current operation, just have some patience.
  3. After it’s done with “processes” again a new window will pop. Select the radio button before “Enter the product key” and click on Next.
  4. Read the License Terms carefully and if you want to continue the upgrade, accept them by ticking the before “I accept the license terms.”, after that click on Next.
  5. After you click on Next the Global and Edition Upgrade Rules will perform some checks, if this check goes without any problems the Select Instance step is shown automatically.
  6. Select the instance of SQL Server you want to upgrade and click on Next.
  7. The Feature Rules step will perform 6 checks and again if no errors occur, you’ll be brought to the “Ready to upgrade edition” step.
  8. Here you can see the summary of features that will be chanced, if this is looking good, click Upgrade.
  9. After the upgrade is complete, you can close the window.

And afterwards checking the properties in the SQL Management Studio: