Working with Date-Based Versioning

Learn about licenses for products that use date-based versioning.

When you generate a license for a product that uses date-based versioning, the license version is created with the date that is the later of:

The license purchase date
The date the customer’s support plan ends

For example, two customers are named Acme and Backme. Each customer purchases version 3.0 of ProductX on January 1st, 2005. However, Backme also purchases support for the product until the end of 2005. The licenses generated for Acme and Backme have different versions:

For Acme:

INCREMENT ProductX SYBASE 2005.01010 ...\       NOTICE="Acme" …

For Backme:

INCREMENT ProductX SYBASE 2005.12310 ...\       NOTICE="Backme" …MP=365…

Acme can use any version of ProductX built before January 1st, 2005. Backme can similarly use any version of ProductX built before January 1st, 2005 but can also use any maintenance releases or EBFs for ProductX built before December 31st, 2005.

ProductX uses its build date as the version when requesting licenses, so an EBF built on March 19th, 2005 requests a license version greater or equal to 2005.0319. This request is satisfied by the license generated by Backme. Acme does not have a valid license for this request.

If Backme renews their support contract for ProductX until the end of 2006, they must generate and deploy new licenses with the new end-of-support date. These licenses differ from those seen previously because they are an upgrade of the license from the old version to the new version. Such licenses look similar to:

UPGRADE ProductX SYBASE 2005.12310 2006.12310 ...

Note: The UPGRADE line is exactly the same as an INCREMENT line with the exception that the version of the license to be upgraded precedes the license version field.