License Type in SQL Server 2005

  • In SQL Server 2000, you could go to the control panel and open SQL Server 2000 Licensing Setup to determine which flavor of SQL Server was installed. Where do I find the same information in 2005? I looked at LicenseType in serverproperty, but it showed disabled and I know when I upgraded from 2000 to 2005 I told the install it is a per processor license. Thanks in advance for your help.

  • Tracking License Information in SQL 2005

    SQL 2005 no longer tracks licensing (per seat or per processor) via registry entries. SQL 2005 still reads the registry for this information, but the SQL 2005 setup doesn’t put licensing information in the registry during setup as in SQL 2000.

    This is by-design. Hence, when ServerProperty(‘LicenseType’) is run on a SQL 2005 installation, ‘DISABLED’ is always returned.

    This could be a problem for large companies who would like a programmatic way to track licensing rather than just having paper license tracking (which is the current method in SQL 2005).

    Supported Resolution

    Since SQL 2005 still queries the registry for licensing information, add the following key and values and ServerProperty(‘LicenseType’) will return license information.

    Note: Licensing has always been server wide and not SQL instance specific. This setting would apply to all instances of SQL Server on the server.

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\90\MSSQLLicenseInfo\MSSQL9.00

    If you want to configure SQL Server for Per Processor then add these Registry Values under that Key adjusting for the number of processors you have a license for:

    Name Type Value

    Mode REG_DWORD 2 ß LICENSE_MODE_PERPROC

    ConcurrentLimit REG_DWORD 4 ß Number of Processors

    If you want to configure SQL Server for Per Seat licensing then add these Registry values under the Key adjusting for the number of seat license you have purchased.

    Name Type Value

    Mode REG_DWORD 0 ß LICENSE_MODE_PERSEAT

    ConcurrentLimit REG_DWORD 100 ß No. of client licenses registered for SQL Server in Per Seat mode.

    Test in SQL Management Studio

    You need to stop and restart SQL Server 2005 before the information will be available to ServerProperty() as the registry is read on start-up of SQL Server. With the above settings you would see the following when you restart SQL Server 2005.

    SELECT ServerProperty('LicenseType') as LicenseType, ServerProperty('NumLicenses') as ProcessorCount

    Output:

    LicenseType ProcessorCount

    PER_PROCESSOR 4

  • Thanks, Kevin, very helpful information.

    Glenn

  • My pleasure. There were several changes to server property which caused many of us some headaches.

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