Re: licensing

Brian

By default, Oracle has no licensing check in its software. We rely on good faith and honesty, as you say. I think the reasoning here is that if we get a lot more people on than originally licensed, a lot more people will say what a great product it is (hopefully!) and buy more.

Having said that, there are two ways Oracle has for checking license use. Firstly, there is a group in Oracle that will, at your request, come on site to try and help you sort out how many licenses you need. When I worked in Australia, we had a client who asked for this because they had lots of boxes with Oracle on it, and as you may be aware, Oracle licensing has changed over time. At one stage it was box based, then concurrent users, and so on. The end result was the poor client had no idea if they were meeting their license requirements, so this group came in (can't remember the name of them now, and it's probably different in the US anyway), and helped work out how many licenses they should be paying for.

The second approach is that the DBA can actually limit the number of connections to a single database using LICENSE_* parameters in the init.ora file. You can say I only want to allow 50 users maximum, and I want users 46 - 50 to get a warning that you're approaching the license limit. Of course, this is for one database only, so you need to manage this across multiple databases by allocating a licensed number of users to each database.

HTH. Pete

Brian Howard wrote:

> I am a newbie at licensing. How does this work. Is there a physical
> limitation which only allows the licensed number of users or is this a
> good faith and honesty issue? For example is someone only has a
> developers license on Oracle for 5 users, what happens if ten users
> attempt to use the program? Will it work or forbid it? Is this pretty
> much the same for other software as well i.e. Microsoft.

--
Regards

Pete

Received on Wed Jul 21 1999 - 11:12:48 CDT