Re: User Licensing Question

Greetings I don't consider a newsgroup to be the place for citing policy. Here's a few pointers; the 5 processes per user session is an unenforced guideline - the objective is to tie the sizing and costing of the RDBMS to the rest of the system - if the client is expecting a pool of power users to have sessions en masse, so should there be comensurate licencing of the engine and tools software. Mr Informix flirted with enforcing licencing - nobody liked it and it's gone. I think of our licencing policy as the basis for a contract between a vendor and a client. Such contracts are to be negotiated and the Ts&Cs should be 'fair and reasonable' and mutually acceptable. The idea of kicking out the nth user session is not basis for a well accepted technology. Other vendors still persist with such enforcement. Even ignoring the issue of the system resources utilised to check sessions, it's pure folly to pursue such strictures. If the client is not disclosing the use of the software to the vendor, that's the problem and the solution is not a piece of restrictive software. We are now looking at EDI as a major player in the RDBMS market. As with TP monitors, the concept of a user session is garbled and disguised. Consider also, the concepts of 'active, concurrent user' and then realise that concession must be made for the nature of the application. Banking software is easy, but a message handling application is fraught with confusion; there are 'log in in the morning users', 'admin users', 'store and forward daemons' - all manner of alternative interpretations to the real purpose of the database. There's also the issue of background or batch processing. To be argumentative, if one were to install OnLine only for batch jobs, should it be free? Should it be licenced for one user? Obviously not, the point here is the need for negotiation and agreement, not perverting the uses of a system to fit into the licencing verbiage of one vendor or another. Believe it or not, Informix licencing policy, now moving to user based pricing, is regarded as more than competitive and, in my mind, it's fair. In the spirit of what I have just written, I welcome any and all comment. Regards Adam peter@prospect.anprod.csiro.au (Peter Wiley - Poultry) writes: >I, too would like to know more about this 5 process/user limit. We typically >start a master process (menu) which runs a program doing real work which *may* >start a background report (using RUN). This may explain why, sometimes, some >of the background reports mysteriously "Vanish". Easy to start many background >reports running and very efficient in terms of user interfaces - the user gets >the screen back immediately. >Point is, there is *always* a minimum of 2 informix processes/user running. >Peter Wiley >Database Designer, Animal Genetics -- # Regards # Adam Green, Federal Office, Canberra # Product Manager - Australia # Ph. + 61 6 273 1200 Fax + 61 6 273 1220 eMail adamg@informix.com