Oracle foresees gratis database

Oct 31, 2005: The momentum behind open source seems to be increasing by the day, and hot off the heels of the announcement last week that juggernauts like IBM, McData, Cisco Systems, Fujitsu and Sun Microsystems are putting their technology where their mouths by pledging their support to a new open source community, Oracle has signalled its intention to release a free version of its database.

Oracle 10g Express Edition will be aimed at students and small organisations running single processor servers, and is no doubt intended to encourage familiarity with Oracle instead of competitor products like MySQL or SQL Server Express.

Oracle has already released a relatively inexpensive low-end database with last years 10g Standard, however by taking another step down and giving away it for nix it is ensuring competitiveness with other open source databases that have become popular of late, particularly with web developers.

The upcoming release comes during a month of interesting developments at Oracle, having seen it acquire the Finnish InnoDB earlier on in October. InnoDB is a storage engine for Oracle competitor MySQL, and whilst Oracle has said it is keen to work with MySQL instead of undermine it through this purchase, this free database further illustrates Oracle's fancy footwork throughout the sector.

The express edition will be available through Oracle's developer network and include a Web-based administration console development tools.

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