PRO Edition: Licensing

PRO Edition: Licensing #

Purchasing Licenses #

Today, the Professional edition requires each tested SQL Server instance to have a one-time purchase of a license through the Portal. Purchasing a license today guarantees application updates through 2025. After that, we will offer a software maintenance contract or subscriptions.

The Professional Edition requires one license per server configured. Licenses aren’t assigned to specific computers. As servers are retired, that license can move to a new server. The portal accepts credit cards. If you want to pay with an invoice, please use the Contact form in the portal.

After purchasing licenses, an API key is downloaded and saved on your workstation – ideally in your repository. SQLDSC.exe downloads an updated license file using that API key at each execution.

As of October 2022, exceeding your license count is a warning and not an error.

Licensed Servers #

As each server is tested the first time, it is added to ./config/state/server_list.ndjson with state="active". A server is considered active and needs a license until it is retired or deleted from the file. The hash in the server list is a SHA256 hash of the domain, computer, instance, and database.

Retiring a Server #

A server can be retired by:

  1. Removing it from the appropriate targets file
  2. Removing it from server_list.ndjson or setting the state to retired

The command sqldsc retire PRODTXN will set status="retired" in server_list.ndjson for a server with computer="PRODTXN". This can be further filtered using flags for --domain, --instance, and --database (for Azure) It will list the servers to be retired and ask for confirmation.

Running SQLDSC against a retired server will result in an error.

What We Record #

Today #

Today, we only record the total number of Active servers from server_list.ndjson.

In the Future #

In the future we may also record:

  • Repository ID
  • Hash of the server from the server list file
  • Executable version information
  • After an opt-in, the Domain, computer, and instance of each server. This allows the portal to handle server retirement.
  • Usage of various features