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Can you help me with my software licensing question?

I have read up online, and through some threads here like this one. But I'm still confused and need to see if anyone can shed some light.

My company is deploying a clickonce application that will be on multiple computers (about 50). It will be accessing an SQL Server database and I was wondering what kind of SQL Server licensing should I/need to have?

The application currently logs in via SQL Server authentication using one SQL Server user.

It seems logical that I would just need one user CAL and even through there will be up to 50 connections it should all still work.

Am I right?

Community
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Jose
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4 Answers4

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Nope. You have one SQL user, but you have 50 seats hitting the box. Last time I ran through this sort of scenario, the magic number for CALs was just about 50 where it became more economical to get the per-processor license.

That said, if you don't have more than 4gb of data and don't need that much horsepower, SQL Express could be a good place to start. Biggest downside is generally you don't have the SQL agent so you need to manage backups and such through scheduled tasks and sqlcmd.exe. But that isn't unmanageable if you your scenario isn't horribly complex.

Wyatt Barnett
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For CAL based licensing, you'd need one per user or computer that will be accessing the database. Microsoft's licensing is pretty explicit about multiplexing users thru a single user, so even if your users are submitting to a webservice that is the only "user" that directly hits the database, you'd still need to license each user.

Scott Ivey
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See this question on Serverfault.com

The upshot is, yes, you'll either need client licenses (CALs) for each of the 50 computers it is deployed on, OR you'll need a per-processor license.

BradC
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I work for a small company and we have deployed a clickonce app a couple of months ago. For now we are using SQL Express on an XP Pro virtual machine. This setup is working for us. The only annoyance I've run into is the lack of the ability to schedule backups with the database. But I haven't fully looked into what my options are for automating that just yet. For now I have a maintenance window which I use to back up the entire virtual machine.

3dinfluence
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