Why do users have to be explicitly assigned to licences on cloud/hosted SQL Servers?

Question

 

 Why do users have to be explicitly assigned to licences on cloud/hosted SQL Servers whereas on on-prem servers they can be unassigned, allowing concurrent licencing.

 

Answer



Users have to be explicitly assigned on cloud/hosted servers because Jiwa doesn't have permissions to look in the sys.sysprocesses table in the master database, to see which users are connected and thus no concurrent licencing.

In the next major release (post 07.02.01) we are using contained database authentication by default, so all users will have to be assigned regardless of the server being on-prem or hosted.  There will be no concurrent licencing.

https://jiwa.atlassian.net/browse/DEV-6904