Licensing Overview

Welcome to the KX product licensing overview.

All KX products require a license. KX offers licensing based on provisioned RAM capacity, number of licensed cores or by number of licensed users. Refer to the information below. For more information, contact KX at sales@kx.com.

Production use definition

Use of KX software in the normal course of business is considered as production use. Non-production use of KX software includes but is not limited to evaluation, migration, fault diagnosis, internal benchmarking, staging, quality assurance, internal development and testing in connection with the functionality of the product, or for backup or disaster recovery. No work to support a production environment is permitted in a non-production environment. For the avoidance of doubt, the use of the non-production environment for manipulation or review of data or data sources for production of analytics, algorithms, visualisations and reports or extensions to the software for use in the normal course of business is considered production use.

License types

  • Trial - these are automatically generated during the sign-up process. They require a public internet connection and are not issued for use in production environments. After sign-up, you should receive a welcome email with a link to download the license file to your local environment. It also contains a Base64 encoded string that can be used in conjunction with an environment variable. The license is a file named kc.lic.

  • Commercial - these are distributed by KX's license administration service. They do not require a public internet connection and so are suitable for air-gapped, fire-walled deployments. The term of a commercial license is agreed as part of the product purchase. Upon agreement, you should receive a welcome email with a link to your license. This license is a file named k4.lic.

  • Proofs of concept, bespoke evaluations or emergency licenses - a short-term license can be provided in proof of concept, bespoke evaluations or emergency situations. Contact your sales representative to get this type of license.

Reporting requirements

  • Provisioned RAM-based licensing - understand the requirements for self-managed customers to report RAM capacity to KX.

  • Cores-based licensing - find out how cores are counted for reporting to KX.

  • User-based licensing - learn how named users are counted for reporting to KX.

Usage restrictions

For our kdb+ and kdb Insights SDK products, find out how KX manage product restrictions.