About Pervasive.SQL Workgroup

This section provides some basic information about Pervasive.SQL Workgroup. For a detailed discussion of Pervasive.SQL architecture, please refer to Pervasive Products and Services.

If you would like more information about what comes in your product and what gets installed, please see Chapter 2, Preparing to Install Pervasive.SQL.

Purpose

You have purchased Pervasive.SQL Workgroup. This version of the product ships with a five-user license and is designed to support single-user or small workgroup installations.

Pervasive.SQL Workgroup offers the same level of reliability and features as the Server engine. The only differences lie in networking and performance in mid- and large-size environments.

Pervasive.SQL Workgroup offers a flexible approach to accessing data on remote servers, allowing a variety of small network configurations. If you have data files on a remote file system with no database engine present, you can configure Pervasive.SQL Workgroup so that a particular engine is always used to access the remote data, or you can set it up so that the first engine to access the files then "serves" those files until there are no more requests for data. After this point, again the first engine to access the files then owns the files while requests are coming in.

Where to Install

Pervasive.SQL Workgroup can be installed on the same computer where the database files are located, or it can be installed on other computers to access the data over the network. All client components are installed with Pervasive.SQL Workgroup, so even if you access remote files through another Workgroup engine, you do not need to install the client.

In the case of web applications, the client must be installed on the same computer as the web server. Multiple web server platforms require a client on each platform.

User Licenses

Pervasive.SQL Workgroup engines are installed by default with a five-user license. If you require a license that allows more concurrent users, consider the Pervasive.SQL Server engine, which is shipped with a ten-user license and is capable of scaling to hundreds of concurrent users with the purchase of additional licenses.

A Pervasive.SQL engine cannot be installed on more than one machine. Your user count license refers to the number of client connections allowed to that engine, not to the number of machines to which you are allowed to install the Pervasive.SQL engine. In a Workgroup environment, every machine that will access Pervasive.SQL data should have a Workgroup engine installed.

Features

All Pervasive database engines offer the same powerful feature set and full-functioned support for programming interfaces. All engine editions are plug n' play compatible, requiring no application changes to switch from one engine to another. Data files are binary-compatible across all supported platforms.

The chart below shows the major differences between the different editions of the product.