Microsoft SQL Server Support Blog

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

Posted By:    Eric Burgess