Re: Oracle licensing term "named user"

Thomas Gaines wrote:

> All -
>
> In preparation for a discussion with my organization's purchasing
> people, I'm reviewing our Oracle license usage. Long before I
> arrived on the scene here as DBA, my organization purchased a
> license for "100 named users on an unlimited number of servers,"
> to quote our IT manager. I realize that only our Oracle license
> sales rep can definitely answer my license-related questions, but
> before I talk to him, I wanted to hear your opinions.
>
> What exactly is a "named user"? Would each noninternal-Oracle
> process in the v$session view be a named user? Would the use
> of MTS affect the way that we count our named users? What
> about other forms of connection pooling? I'm woefully uninformed
> in this area, unfortunately.

A named user would be you, with your own uid in the database. You could use a number of apps, on an unlimited number of servers, still you would be 1 named user.
Perfectly for a client/server environment, where you can do this.

>
> My group delivers web-based maps, using Oracle as the
> back-end repository for the data. The map server makes numerous
> Oracle connections, but they're all as the same Oracle user.

Yep - Oracle recognized this, and thought it would be selling short on themselves to let this go thru as 1 named user - it obviously isn't. That's when the UPU was invented: the Universal Power Unit. Basically it boils down to: doesn't matter how many users are involved you pay for the power of your server. Rationale: more powerful servers are likely to serve more users. Add some RISC/CISC scaling and voila.

I'm not sure Oracle still applies this schema - I was getting used to it when the Oracle rep I regulary speak announced it would be changed. Again. This schema was about 2 month in effect then.

Anyway, a named user can always be identified; it's a person, with her/his own schema in the database. As soon as you have an environment where you (possibly) can no longer identify each and every user, you're stuck; Oracle is bound to tell you to use another licence scheme. Looks like you are in the second group.

Frank Received on Wed May 08 2002 - 15:37:52 CDT