Oracle releases free database

Oracle seems to have finally responded to the growing presence of free and open source databases in the small and mid-size segment. The Oracle site is now offering Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Beta Release for download on Windows and Linux.

Although there seems to be no formal press release or announcement anywhere on the Oracle site as yet, news stories elsewhere suggested that the Express Edition will be available for free.

ZDNet reports that “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.”

For more technical info check out the Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Tutorial and the Getting Started Guide.

In his blog, Steve Muench says that “For easy Java/J2EE development, our free JDeveloper 10g development environment works great with Oracle 10g Express Edition, too.” While Sergio Leunissen says that “I guarantee you that you’ve never seen a database up and running this quickly”

Earlier this month, IBM released a free versionof DB2 and MySQL released 5.0. A free version of SQLServer is also likely to be released next month.

Lots of action happening in the free DB space. So how does one decide which free DB to use?

Reference:
>> Download Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Beta Release

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