About the Pervasive PSQL Engines
This section provides some basic information about the Pervasive PSQL Server and Workgroup engines. For a discussion of Pervasive PSQL architecture, see Understanding the Pervasive Component Architecture in Advanced Operations Guide.
Pervasive PSQL Server
The Pervasive PSQL Server database engine is designed to support up to many hundreds of concurrent network users when installed on the required hardware. It is capable of supporting web, corporate, departmental, and other client/server or web-based applications where reliability and performance are critical.
The Pervasive PSQL Server engine may be installed with license blocks for 6, 10, 20, 50, 100, 250, 500, or an unlimited number of users, depending on the number of user licenses you purchased. The server engine is capable of scaling to hundreds of concurrent users with the purchase of additional licenses.
Pervasive PSQL Workgroup
The Pervasive PSQL Workgroup database engine is designed to support single-user or small workgroup installations.
Pervasive PSQL 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 PSQL 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 PSQL 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.
A Pervasive PSQL 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 PSQL engine. In a Workgroup environment, every machine that will access Pervasive PSQL data should have a Workgroup engine installed.
Engine Feature Comparison
All Pervasive database engines offer the same powerful feature set and full-functioned support for programming interfaces. The chart below shows the major differences between the different editions of the product.
Table 1
Comparison of Server and Workgroup Features
Feature
Server
Workgroup
Supports Btrieve, ODBC, OLE DB, Java, JDBC, PDAC and ActiveX interfaces
* 
* 
Full-featured relational support (online backup, security, referential integrity, management tools, and so on)
* 
* 
Binary compatible data files across all platforms and engine editions
* 
* 
Easy plug and play upgrading, no application changes required to change engines.
* 
* 
Includes complete online documentation
* 
* 
Can access data on a file server where no database engine is installed
 
* 
Supports remote ODBC client connections
* 
* 
Requires a Workgroup engine on all computers expected to access remote data
N/A
* 
Engine runs on Windows
* 
* 
Engine runs on Linux
* 
 
Multi-user for small groups
* 
* 
Scales to thousands of users
* 
 
Extranet license available
* 
 
Enforces Operating System Security
*