RE: License Question on IDS

I'l take a stab at this, but please defer to the other more experienced users and official Informix employees' views on the subject. I can only comment on my experience. Answeres are embedded below. Best regards, Edmund Nigel Gall Senior Information Systems Specialist Process Plant Services Limited Atlantic Avenue, Point Lisas Industrial Estate Point Lisas, Couva, Trinidad & Tobago, W.I. Tel: (868) 636 2906 x 274 Fax: (868) 679 3770 -----Original Message----- From: Candy McCall [mailto:candym@olcinc.com] Sent: 2000 February 18 12:45 PM To: Informix List Subject: License Question on IDS A few questions: How are the number of users counted on IDS? Is it the number of database connections or the number of users? ENG - In terms of licensing, you should buy enough licenses to cover the maximum number of users accessing the IDS product simultaneously. That said, I know for a fact that IDS doesn't currently have any user lockout mechanisms in place for IDS. Hence, if you have a 5-user license and 1000 users connect from different PC's or through shared memory, no-one will be locked out. This has always been so, but I suspect Informix may change this policy soon, as they've imposed strict license management with their D4GL product (i.e. if you have a 10-user D4GL license and 10 users are logged in via 10 different PC's, if an 11th user tries from a different PC, he will get error -6017). We have a customer that has a 11 user license on IDS 7.3x. If we have a D4GL (or even I4GL) process that is connected to the database and it spawns another process "RUN .... WITHOUT WAITING", does that use another user of the IDS? They are getting the error -25588 at times. ENG - Error -25588 makes me think that you need to bump up the connections value for your NETTYPE field. It doesn't matter much (except for performance) whether the users use shm or tcp, but the NETTYPE connections value needs to be high enough to cover the number of *connections* to the database. A single user may have more than one connections (as can be seen by running onstat -u). You do not have to limit this value to the number of users that you licensed the product. Depending on what you run, you may want to use something like 2-5 connections per user (or more). Using your example above, for each time you have an application execute the RUN ... WITHOUT WAITING command to spawn another 4GL or D4GL application you'd use up another *database connection* but NOT another *user license* since it is the same user running boh programs. Does D4GL use the ipcshm or tlitcp protocol under NETTYPE? ENG - That depends on what your users' INFORMIXSERVER variable is set to at the time of running the D4GL application. They may use either, I think. The way D4GL works is something like Citrix WinFrame or the old mainframe environment; even though you see a Windows-based client application running onscreen, the real processing takes place on the UNIX server, so the connection doesn't have to be tcp. It can be shm or tcp (via local loopback). Should the # users in the NETTYPE setting specify the maximum # users the license is for, or can it be more? ENG - Answered above. When a user runs our application (in 4GL or D4GL), it will start other 4GL or D4GL processes and we're not expecting each of those spawned processes to count as a licensed user. ENG - As stated above, the only product that you should be mindful about regarding user-license restrictions/lockout is D4GL. You don't need to worry about IDS or the classic 4GL applications. Thanks for any enlightenment. ENG - Hope this helps. Candy -- Candy McCall ONLINE Computing, Inc. (candym@olcinc.com)