You may find yourself in a situation where you need to transfer a GoldMine database from a later to an earlier version of SQL. A simple backup and restore won’t work in this instance.

Googling for an answer may lead you to try to transfer the data by means of the Scripting Wizard in Management Studio. Unfortunately, a GoldMine database transferred in this way won’t work, for reasons that I haven’t yet managed to discern.

Luckily, GoldMine itself can provide the solution. As long as you have the luxury of having two database instances available (say SQL 2008 and SQL 2005) then you can use GoldMine to connect to both, and use the ‘new database’ wizard to copy from the 2008 instance to the 2005 instance.

Simple, elegant, and saves a lot of messing around!