Re: Informix

Trevor, 27-Dec-1995 one of the problems to Informix during the last many years has been the definition of a user. A user could be: 1 a physical human user, or 2 a backend process, or 3 a number (fx. up to 5) of window sessions running under the same userid. 4 etc. The most clean count is to count the physical users, but then you can count the max. number of concurrent users or the total number of the different physical persons who are allowed to user connect to the product or ... As you can see, the question gets bigger and bigger, then when you got a nice definition you would like to implement it with some software and then it gets more complicated. The most commonly used definition is (I think) the max number of backend processes. If that is a big problem you might write applications, which connect to the server and then disconnect again when the data are returned to the frontend. Then when you need the database again you connect to the server, get the data and disconnect. This connecting and disconnecting will reduce the max concurrent number of backends. If you implement a very distributed environment with a lot of servers and a lot of databases you get a very high total number of backends placed on a low number of physical users. If you get a 32 user license, you can as far as I know set it to a higher number. Talk with Informix about it and I think it is a good thing to base the number of users on the maximum of concurrent physical users. It is easy to measure this number. The number of backend processes (sqlturbo) will be higher than this number. >We are about to buy informix version 5 and have licensing questions. What >constitutes a user? At a previous employer we ran SCO and version 4.1 of >informix. We had less that 30 people, but with background processes and >multiple login screens, we had the Informix Shared Memory Paramater Max # >of Users set to 85. Any less than this would get errors. If we get a 32 >user license, can the Max # of Users be set to more than 32? Do you get a >to many users error? Is it based on the number of sqlturbo processes >running? I would really appreciate some help. > >Thank you very much. -Trevor >trevor@jurist.com is the best place to mail me. Regards ----------------------------------------------------------------- Databaseadministrator Poul Pedersen Kuwait Petroleum (Danmark) A/S Hummeltoftevej 49 Mail: pp@q8.dk 2830 Virum Voice: +45 45 98 45 94 Denmark Fax: +45 45 83 16 95 -----------------------------------------------------------------