CREATE DATABASE or ALTER DATABASE failed because the resulting cumulative database size would exceed your licensed limit of 10240 MB per database.

I am big fan of database, especially SQL server. There is no UI, no HTML, no scripts, no OOPS code. Only data and you have to play with that data.
 

I took backups of our production Sitecore master and web database and trying to restored them on QA environment.

I have done this backup and restore work 100 of times in my life. But this time I tried for 5 times and received below error during restore process –

System.Data.SqlClient.SqlError: CREATE DATABASE or ALTER DATABASE failed because the resulting cumulative database size would exceed your licensed limit of 10240 MB per database.

Solution:

I come to know that - Our database file size is more than 10 GB and QA SQL server is of type of SQL Express Edition which does not support file size more than 10 GB. 

How to know what’s the type of SQL server?

1.    Right click on server instance-> choose Properties-> Check Product entry in Server Properties window as shown in below diagram

2.    You can also get the same information by using query "SELECT @@VERSION" as follows

How to restore this 10 GB Sitecore database files?

          1. You can shrink the database files

          2. Restore databases on Standard Edition SQL Server. [I prefer this approach]

Please leave your comments or share this info if it’s useful for you.