Managing License Warnings and Limits

Term License Warnings and Expiration

The term portion of a Vertica license is easy to manage—you are licensed to use Vertica until a specific date. If the term of your license expires, Vertica alerts you with messages appearing in the Administration Tools and vsql. For example:

=> CREATE TABLE T (A INT);
NOTICE 8723: Vertica license 432d8e57-5a13-4266-a60d-759275416eb2 is in its grace period; grace period expires in 28 days
HINT: Renew at https://softwaresupport.softwaregrp.com/
CREATE TABLE

Contact Vertica at https://softwaresupport.softwaregrp.com/ as soon as possible to renew your license, and then install the new license. After the grace period expires, Vertica stops processing DML queries and allows DDL queries with a warning message. If a license expires and one or more valid alternative licenses are installed, Vertica uses the alternative licenses.

Data Size License Warnings and Remedies

If your Vertica columnar license includes a raw data size allowance, Vertica periodically audits the size of your database to ensure it remains compliant with the license agreement. For details of this audit, see Auditing Database Size. You should also monitor your database size to know when it will approach licensed usage. Monitoring the database size helps you plan to either upgrade your license to allow for continued database growth or delete data from the database so you remain compliant with your license. See Monitoring Database Size for License Compliance for details.

If your database's size approaches your licensed usage allowance (above 75% of license limits), you will see warnings in the Administration Tools , vsql, and Management Console. You have two options to eliminate these warnings:

• Upgrade your license to a larger data size allowance.
• Delete data from your database to remain under your licensed raw data size allowance. The warnings disappear after Vertica's next audit of the database size shows that it is no longer close to or over the licensed amount. You can also manually run a database audit (see Monitoring Database Size for License Compliance for details).

If your database continues to grow after you receive warnings that its size is approaching your licensed size allowance, Vertica displays additional warnings in more parts of the system after a grace period passes. Use the GET_COMPLIANCE_STATUS function to check the status of your license.

If Your Vertica Premium Edition Database Size Exceeds Your Licensed Limits

If your Premium Edition database size exceeds your licensed data allowance, all successful queries from ODBC and JDBC clients return with a status of SUCCESS_WITH_INFO instead of the usual SUCCESS. The message sent with the results contains a warning about the database size. Your ODBC and JDBC clients should be prepared to handle these messages instead of assuming that successful requests always return SUCCESS.

If Your Vertica Community Edition Database Size Exceeds 1 Terabyte

If your Community Edition database size exceeds the limit of 1 terabyte, Vertica stops processing DML queries and allows DDL queries with a warning message.

To bring your database under compliance, you can choose to:

• Drop database tables. You can also consider truncating a table or dropping a partition. See TRUNCATE TABLE or DROP_PARTITIONS.
• Upgrade to Vertica Premium Edition (or an evaluation license).