Free Database Solutions from Oracle

Free Database Solutions from Oracle

Oracle is currently the world leaders in providing database solutions. However, the competition is catching up fast and so is the open source movement. MySQL just released their latest version MySQL 5.0 which brings some of the advance features of database culture to the popular open source offerings. Similarly, there are other low cost and even free alternatives to oracle, which are posing competition to the company.

Oracle is now working on releasing a free version of its database. They are 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. They are aiming at the students, small organizations, and software vendors that could embed the Oracle database with an application.

It is similar to the commercial offerings from the company but is limited on its usage capabilities. It would support only servers with one processor, with 4GB of disk space and 1GB of memory. A beta version is already out available on the Oracle Technology Network Web site for the Windows and Linux platform.

Not only Oracle, even IBM earlier this month released a free version of its own DB2 database as part of a PHP development package. Microsoft is also due to release a free version of SQL Server 2005, called Express, something this month.