Re: Licensing a database app

Brian wrote:
>
> We are developing a database application that tracks vehicles. We need a
> method to limit the number of vehicles the application will track.
>
> The application is licensed on a per vehicle basis. If a customer wants to
> track 1000 vehicles, then the customer must buy a 1000 vehicles license and
> the application must then enforce that limit.
>
> The application uses an ODBC data source (SQL Server or Oracle) and VB COM
> components to access the data. The database is installed on the customer's
> server. *** Therefore the customer has full control over the database
> content and database structure. *** Any solution must take into account the
> customer can change any field of any table and modify the structure of the
> database in any way.

I'm trying to imagine any system that will permit the user to "modify the database structure in any way" and survive the effort.

It seems to me that almost any license-control package would provide you with the means of storing the record-limit, which your application could then check when processing various query result-sets. All you would need to do is to program in the appropriate controls. Or, perhaps you could have it do a 'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM' query at some appropriate time to see if the table contains more records than you are willing to accept. Received on Wed Jun 24 1998 - 00:00:00 CEST