Oracle 10g XE goes free
If you are Oracle user at home, you should have really felt the pain of the database server eating most of your system resources. Added to it, in all possibilities, we are using an illegal copy of the Personal Edition or the Enterprise Edition.
You would never imagine running Java applications against Oracle just because of the simple reason we can never run our application servers and database server and, of course, our IDE in a single machine. So, we just move in for MySQL, Postgre or other open-source alternatives.
You would have already known that DB2, just a few months back, came up with a free edition of its Database. And Microsoft is also coming up with its free edition of SQL Server 2005 as ‘Express Edition’
Oracle now joins the bandwagon. And, as always, Oracle is our favourite database.
(Please go through the document (at least the faq) and the pdf attachment for more details). The twp_general_10gdb_product
_family.pdf has a wonderful “feature comparison” table at the end of it.
Please dont get alarmed when they say Java development is not possible in Oracle 10g XE. They just mean that we cannot write Oracle PL/SQL stored procedures in Java. And i’ve still not seen anybody writing
“CREATE PROCEDURE DEPT_PROCEDURE AS LANGUAGE JAVA”
That because Oracle XE doesnt come with an inbuilt JVM. (You know Oracle 9i came up with JRE 1.4 bundled inside). Regular SQL, (ALL) PL/SQL, JDBC calls will just work fine.
Best part, Oracle 10g XE comes just as a 250MB iso image.
Linux users, who were denied of the privilege of using Oracle, just because we dont get a pirated version of the full database, can now download their RPM installers direct from the oracle site. Debian users (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, MEPIS, Mandriva, CentOS) can download their .deb installers. All installers are around the same size.
Good luck.
