Oracle Offers Free Database

[technobard]

Oracle intends to release a free version of its database, a reaction to the growing competitive pressure from low-end open-source databases.

The database heavyweight on Tuesday is expected to announce the beta release of Oracle 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE), which will be generally available by the end of the year. It is targeted at students, small organizations and software vendors that could embed the Oracle database with an application.

The latest edition is the same as other databases in Oracle's lineup but is limited in usage. It can only run servers with one processor, with 4GB of disk memory and 1GB of memory. Oracle on Friday offered a beta version of the new database for Windows and Linux on its Oracle Technology Network Web site.

The new low-end edition is aimed squarely at free and open-source alternatives to Oracle's namesake database, said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Oracle's server technologies division.

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For a lot of people, I suspect this will be attractive; a way to get Oracle experience on the resume if nothing else. The limitations are fine for a lot of small applications.

First Oracle buys InnoDB (MySQL's ACID compliant transaction database engine) and now a free offering of their own. They are clearly seeing the threat of open source and responding to it.