Is their a 3rd party add-on that can act as a connection pooling engine ? In
other words several clients connect to this connection pool engine which
in-turn manages the connections to the database. Thinking if their is one
such software that that will reduce the number of concurrent connections
which in-turn will reduce the number of client access licenses required.

You will want to discuss the legal requirements of licensing and
what your applicaiton needs are with a sales rep. They are
best to evaluate what your real client access licenses need
to be.


"handheldmaster" <23989384uruff (AT) 39484948 (DOT) com> wrote

Just to add some clarity to the last posting

As far as 3rd party connectivity goes (and esp. connection pooling goes):

Nothing here comes without some cost. A 3rd party connection
pool facility will have the potential of adding an extra layer of
overhead
and complexity and will most likely require extra coding effort (API
conventions tend to change). Typically, minimally you need to
follow some coding standards and may find you are unable to use
some SA facilities [in your given API/IDE/language and pool'ed
circumstance]

It may also end up suffer from a loss of transactional control (unless
you anticipate all contingencies) or a loss of
connection/statement/cursor
context control.

Such facilities are not necessarily universal. ODBC connection pooling
may or may not be fully compatable with OLEDB connection pooling
but the facilities for Java/J2EE applications are definitely different.
Further,
some IDE and development environments may introduce some wrinkles
that connection pooling trips up over and those can be extremely
difficult
to resolve. In short, in a 'mixed-suite' of software modules, you may
have a limiting/diminished benefit of using pooling.

Some loss of central control will occur when connection pooling occures.
The server side will not know what some of the real connection based
information is (see AppInfo for just one example). Futher you are
extending the supply line's and may run into some connection stability,
connection time out, and connection pool based 'automatic reconnect'
issues you will now need to understand and resolve.

Don't get me wrong, pooling has it's applications. You can see how J2EE
based application server solutions work and how pooling becomes a way to
control/limit the connection impact on back-end systems for Web Services
applications. It is just not really intended to help save you simply save
on licensing.

And finally (only for completeness) , it must be mentioned, that
circumventing
a license limiting technology [if anything in SA can be called such] does
not
limit you legal liability to the 'agreed to' licensing terms.

"Nick Elson" <no_span_nicelson (AT) sybase (DOT) com> wrote