Licence activation

Where your licence key comes from

The key arrives by email as soon as the payment for your order is approved, normally within minutes of checkout. It is a character string, not a file, and it is tied to your licence rather than to a particular download — the application you already have installed is the one it unlocks.

• Bought a single licence through checkout? The key is in the confirmation email. If it has not appeared after half an hour, check the spam folder.
• Bought against a quote or a purchase order? The key is sent to the contact address on the order once the invoice is settled or, by arrangement, immediately.
• Key lost, or the colleague who ordered it has left? Write to sales@sqldatalens.com from a company address with the order number or the licence ID and it will be resent.

There is no download to buy separately, and neither downloading nor activating requires an account or a portal login. Every download on the download page is the same build: without a key it runs as the Free Edition or as the 30-day Pro trial, and with a key it runs as the Pro edition.

Online activation (the normal route)

Online activation is the preferred method. The application opens a connection to the licence server over the internet, validates the activation request and binds the licence to the machine you are on.

1. Start SQL DATA LENS.
2. Open the licence dialogue: Help → Manage licence. (In the application the menu entry is spelled Manage license.)
3. Press Activate.
4. Enter your licence key. Paste it rather than typing it — a mistyped character is the most common cause of a rejected activation.
5. Restart SQL DATA LENS.

After the restart the licence is active and all Pro features are available. The licence dialogue then shows the licence as activated, which is also where you check later which licence a machine is using.

What the title bar tells you in trial mode

While the trial is running, the application window title says Pro trial mode, N days left — with N counting down from 30. That is the quickest way to tell which mode a machine is in without opening a dialogue: a trial says so in the title bar, an activated Pro licence does not.

When the trial ends, the application does not stop working. It continues as the Free Edition, which is fully featured against free and community databases, and your connections, scripts and settings stay exactly as they are. Entering a key at that point turns the same installation into the Pro edition. If you need longer to evaluate, ask sales@sqldatalens.com — trial extensions are granted routinely.

If your network uses a proxy

Activation is an outbound HTTPS request. In networks where that goes through an authenticating proxy, the proxy details have to be given to the application first:

1. Open Help → Manage licence.
2. Install the licence key, if you have not already done so.
3. Press Proxy…, enter the proxy details in the dialogue that opens and confirm with OK.
4. Press Activate.

Offline activation through a browser

On a machine with no internet access at all — an isolated network, a hardened jump host — activation runs through a browser on a different machine instead. The activation tool ships inside the installation:

1. Start TurboActivate. You will find TurboActivate.exe inside your SQL DATA LENS installation folder:

   <install path>\jre\bin\TurboActivate.exe

2. Press Other options.
3. Press Manually activate SQL DATA LENS offline and follow the steps shown. The tool produces a request you open in a browser on a machine that does have internet access; the response it gives you back is then loaded into the tool on the offline machine.
4. Start SQL DATA LENS. The licence is active.

Activating on a second machine

A Named User licence belongs to a person, not to a computer. The licensed user may run SQL DATA LENS on more than one machine or virtual machine — a desktop and a laptop, a VM, a terminal server session — and even on several at the same time. What is required is that the licence is activated on each machine, using the same key and the same procedure as above.

An Enterprise licence allows unlimited users and unlimited activations across the organisation under one key. If an activation is refused because the permitted number for your licence has been reached, deactivate an activation you no longer need (below) or write to support@sqldatalens.com with your licence ID — we can release activations from our side. What the editions cover is set out on the pricing page and in the purchasing FAQ.

Deactivating before a machine is decommissioned

An activation stays bound to the hardware it was made on. Before a machine is wiped, reimaged, returned to leasing, scrapped or handed to a colleague, deactivate the licence on it:

1. Start SQL DATA LENS on the machine that is going away.
2. Open Help → Manage licence.
3. Choose Deactivate. The activation is released back to your licence and the application continues as the Free Edition.
4. Activate the same key on the replacement machine.

If the machine is already gone and you never got the chance, nothing is lost: send your licence ID to support@sqldatalens.com and the stale activation will be released for you. Deactivating does not consume or invalidate the key — it is the same key you activate on the new machine.

When a licence expires

Nothing dramatic happens. The Pro features and access to licensed production databases stop, and the application falls back to the Free Edition. It still starts, and your per-user configuration — connections, connection groups, saved SQL scripts, Query Cloud definitions, editor settings — is untouched, because none of it lives inside the licence.

Renewing means entering the new key under Help → Manage License and activating it in the same way as the first time. There is nothing to reinstall and nothing to reconfigure.

Seeing it coming, and picking a renewal up early

Since 4.01 the Help → Manage License dialogue shows the expiry date and the number of licensed users, so "when does ours run out?" is a question you can answer without looking for the order confirmation. Alongside them:

• Manage subscription… opens the billing side, so a renewal does not start with hunting for the right link.
• Refresh licence now picks up a renewal immediately instead of waiting for the next scheduled check — the button to press when finance has paid and the application has not noticed yet.

A licence that expires within the next 14 days is mentioned in the status bar. A quiet line, not a popup, and not one that interrupts what you were doing.

One related fix worth knowing if you have run into it: activating a licence now takes effect straight away. Until 4.01, connections you already had open kept refusing commercial databases with the Free Edition message until the application was restarted — even though the licence dialogue had just told you the full edition was active. Open your database and carry on; no restart, no reconnect.

Troubleshooting

• "The WMI repository on this computer is broken". Activation reads a hardware fingerprint of the machine through Windows Management Instrumentation, including its physical network adapters. On some machines WMI itself is damaged — typically after a failed driver installation or a "cleaner" utility — and the activation reports it rather than binding the licence to an unreliable fingerprint. The repair steps, including the mofcomp commands to run in an administrative command prompt, are in WMI repository on this computer is broken.

• An activation error mentioning a network adapter. The same fingerprint mechanism reads all real, non-virtualised network adapters. A disabled adapter used to cause errors here; the licensing system was reworked in an earlier release to handle that case, so if you still see it, updating to 4.01 is the first thing to try.

• The activation request never reaches the server. Check outbound HTTPS from the workstation, enter your proxy details if one is in the way, or use offline activation. Blocking the licence server is a valid configuration — it simply means activating through the browser route instead.

• The key is rejected as invalid. Paste it rather than retyping it, check that no trailing space or line break came along with it, and confirm you are using the key for this product rather than one for an earlier Caché Monitor licence. If it is still refused, send the key and the exact message to support@sqldatalens.com.

• The installation itself failed before you got this far. In an unattended or deployed rollout, the setup program reports the reason as an exit code — see installer and setup exit codes — and the installation guide covers the two distributions and their requirements.

Anything not covered here: write to support@sqldatalens.com with your licence ID, your Windows version and the exact message text. The support page lists what makes a report quick to answer.