Oracle licensing term "named user"

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.

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. If each of these sessions can be grouped together as one "named user", we're on Easy Street. Otherwise, we may be running up to some licensing limits.

Thanks for your time,
TG Received on Wed May 08 2002 - 11:08:52 CDT