Oracle Database 10g for free

After Microsoft released SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, which is a free to use and redistribute, Oracle has also gone ahead and announced the release of the Oracle Database 10g Express Edition. Beta versions for Linux and Windows are currently available for free download.

The limitations match that of SQL Server Express Edition exactly. It supports only a single CPU, 1GB of RAM and can contain 4GB of user data. It comes with a browser-based interface for managing the database and there's this nifty tutorial, complete with Flash animations (no less!), to get you started.

Well this size database seems good enough for smaller, more personalized applications. However, open source projects seem to tilt towards supporting MySQL and PostgreSQL. One reason is that these database systems are open source (and free) themselves and another being the fact that they're cross-platform (especially Linux support). But with Oracle now providing a free version (on Linux as well), I wonder if we'll see more of the smaller open source web and desktop applications supporting the Oracle database.

Windows XP Professional ships with IIS, MacOS X ships with Apache, Linux ships with the kitchen sink and now the major database vendors have free versions of their software. It seems like the time is coming for everyone to have their personal servers storing everything from their emails, IMs, browser history, identity etc. for easy access and cross-reference by any local desktop or browser application. Can I download the entire GMail web application along with my e-mails to my local server and use the offline version when I'm not connected?

Links

• Oracle Database 10g Express Edition
• Oracle Database XE Tutorial