How to find the SQL Instance edition ?

Q: How to find the SQL Instance edition ?

Ans: First I thought, its Microsoft. Go to help menu and click on About. It will give you the edition you have installed. But the answer is no. This time it displayed numbers and something which was little bit hard to understand.

So what we do? google it.

And first you find links of Microsoft which is confusing to people like me. So here is the solution.

Follow below steps :

1. Open you SQL server and connect your database.
2. Open (Ctrl + n) new querywindow for master database.
3. And write below query to get understandable answer:

SELECT SERVERPROPERTY('productversion'), SERVERPROPERTY('productlevel'), SERVERPROPERTY('edition')

Note: Above query works for SQL Server 2000 and above 

In other scenario you can use

SELECT @@VERSION

Output will be like :

       Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (SP1) - 11.0.3401.0 (X64) 

Jan  9 2014 13:22:15 

Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation

Standard Edition (64-bit) on Windows NT 6.2 <X64> (Build 9200: ) (Hypervisor)

Original Source: 

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/59444/how-do-you-check-what-version-of-sql-server-for-a-database-using-tsql