I did a little searching and was surprised to not find a best practice document for how to distribute Microsoft SQL Databases. With other database formats, it's common to distribute them as scripts. It seems that feature is rather limited with the built-in tools Microsoft provides. There appear to be limits to the length of the script. We're looking to distribute a database several GBs in size. We could detach the database or provide a backup, but that has its own disadvantages by limiting what versions of the SQL Server will accept the database.
What do you recommend and can you point me to some documentation that handles this practice?
Thank you.