The product, Oracle 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE), is now being officially announced for beta release, with expected availability by year-end.
However, Oracle’s approach to offering free product mirrors commercial offerings like IBM, rather than open source products like MySQL.
Like IBM, which previously released a free version of DB2 bundled with a PHP scripting package, Oracle XE is a miniature version of the real thing. XE will be limited to single-processor servers with maximum of 1GB memory and 4GB of user data.
At press time, we were unable to verify whether single processor support will extend to 1-CPU servers with multi-core chip architectures.
It’s Oracle’s second approach targeting the low-end market, following Oracle 10g Standard Edition One, supporting up to dual processor machines at the cost of $149/user.
While the move ratchets up Oracle’s competition with MySQL, it will continue making the InnoDB storage engine available to its open source rival after having acquired the core technology a few weeks back.
