RDBMS Information - SQL Server - How to find out the exact version of SQL Server instance

This page provides you with a query that will retrieve the exact version of the SQL Server.
Retrieving such information can help us identify if the version is supported by CAST.
For example:
When trying to choose the databases to extract from SQL Server, you might encounter the following error :
2014-12-01 13:50:32.299    DETAIL    2014-12-01 13:50:32.258 - Connected to: jdbc:jtds:sqlserver://BE-S1461-MS3:1533 user: tu_pmddal_dev
2014-12-01 13:50:32.300    DETAIL    2014-12-01 13:50:32.261 - Unknown platform: null
2014-12-01 13:50:32.304    ERROR    An error has occurred during command processing

From the Unknown platform: null error we can know that the version of SQL Server being used is unknown.
So we can run the following query to get the exact version.

Run the following query:

select 'MS SQL Server',convert(varchar(50), SERVERPROPERTY('ProductVersion')),
case when convert(varchar(50), SERVERPROPERTY('ProductVersion')) like '10.%' then 1
when convert(varchar(50), SERVERPROPERTY('ProductVersion')) like '9.%' then 2
when convert(varchar(50), SERVERPROPERTY('ProductVersion')) like '8.%' then 3
else -1 
end

For example, the result looked like below, for one of the issues reported for 7.2:
(No column name) (No column name) (No column name) MS SQL Server 11.0.5532.0 -1
So, if you use some web search engine (like google) to search this build number, you will find the exact version of the SQL Server.

If you web search the above build number on google, you get the result that this is a build version from SQL Server 2012 SP2 which is not supported for 7.2.

Related Pages:

RDBMS Information - SQL Server - Getting Version