Question

We’re working on a product that may or may not have differing license schema for different databases. In particular, a lower-tier product would run on SQLExpress, but we don’t want the end user to be able to use a ‘full-fat’ SQL install – benefiting from the price cut. Clearly this must also be the case for other DBs, so Oracle may command a higher price than SQL, for instance (hypothetically).

We’re using Entity Framework. Obviously this hides all the neatness of accessing the core schema and using sp_version or whatever it is. We’d rather not pre-load the condition by running a series of SQL commands (one for each platform) and see what comes back, as this would limit our DB options. But if necassary, we’re prepared to do it.

So, is it possible to get this using EF itself? DBContext.COnnection.ServerVersion only returns something like ‘9.00.1234’ (for SQL Server 2005). I would assume (though haven’t yet checked – need to install an instance) SQLExpress would return something similar – ‘pretending’ it is full-fat. Obviously, we have no Oracle/MySQL/etc. instance so can’t establish whether that returns text ‘Oracle’ or whatever.

Answer 1

I can’t comment on Entity Framework itself, but for MS SQL Server you can use the T-SQL function SERVERPROPERTY to detect extra information that relates to licence/cost

SELECT     SERVERPROPERTY('LicenseType'),     SERVERPROPERTY('NumLicenses'),     SERVERPROPERTY('EngineEdition'),     SERVERPROPERTY('Edition') 

Otherwise, it’s simply not exposed in the client code