Re: What's a "user" to Oracle???

sturner_at_athena.mit.edu (Stephen Turner) writes:

:>A 'user' to an Oracle instance is a concurrent database connection.
:>However, Oracle does not by default impose a limit. If a 'user' makes a
:>connection via Forms and then in opens another session via SQL Plus, this
:>would constitute two 'user'.
 

:Maybe I'm being picky, but an Oracle user equates to a user id stored in
:the database, created by the CREATE USER statement. A user session is a
:single database connection. So in the example above, there is only one
:user but two user sessions.

I was told (by another developer, I think) at the Oracle Developer conference last March that Oracle has changed or plans to change its definition of a 'user' for licensing purposes.

The original definition was that each connect session was a separate user. (Regardless of the user ID.)

This definition applies to 'concurrent user' licenses. Users with NAMED USER licenses operate under different rules.

According to this unverified report, under the revised definition multiple connect sessions FROM THE SAME CLIENT SYSTEM (eg, from the PC on a user's desktop) under the same user ID are considered just ONE concurrent user.

The speculation was this may have something to do with how Developer 2000 connects to the server from Windows.

I plan to ask around at IOUW in two weeks to see if I can get someone from Oracle to verify this change.

The change would seem to me to reduce the need for NAMED USER licenses, at least for some customers. At least through 7.1.6, the 'highwater mark' that shows up in the logs doesn't seem to reflect any such change in policy. (I'm not sure how the Oracle server would count users under that altered definition, at least not in a way that extends across all of the platforms and networks that Oracle supports.)

While this is a matter of no small concern to DBA's, especially upon our budgets, when asked a related question Oracle VP Lou Jacobs assured the audience at IOUW '94 that Oracle has no intention of ridigly enforcing user license limits in the near future, because the potential legal problems to Oracle from denying access to a user due to an inaccurate user count outweighs the revenue impact from such an enforcement.

So for the time being we are still on the 'honor system' as far as user counts and licenses are concerned.

---
Michael Nolan, Sysop for the DBMS RoundTable on GEnie
nolan_at_tssi.com, dbms_at_genie.com, nolan_at_inetnebr.com
(posted from nolan_at_helios.unl.edu)