Dimitri has an interesting post entitled "And Free Oracle for All" over on his blog about Oracle 10g XE:
At quick glance all features of 10g release 2 supported in XE, including Oracle Text for full text indexing. Maximum DB size is limited by 4Gb and XE will use only one CPU. I guess it‘s fair limitations for entry level, pilot and even for many medium-sized applications.Nice move, Oracle. Why would I want to use MySql now? ;-)
My easiest response is that it‘s only free to a point, and then guess what:
- Need support beyond what you can get in an online forum? Not so free anymore. You either need to already have an Oracle support contract to lookup items in Metalink (but can‘t file TARs on the XE install), or move to something much more expensive in Oracle's product lineup to get full support. (listen to Tom Kyte's podcast about XE for more information on this).
- Need to use more than 4G or 1 CPU (or some other advanced features that are soon to be delivered in the open source realm such as partitioning)?, then you need to move to full-blown Oracle…4G isn‘t a large dataset any more, and with hyperthreading and dual core CPUs becoming mainstream, it seems like a pretty severe restriction for a lot of uses…XE‘s not so “free“ now for those folks.
None of these restrictions are present for the open source database systems. You can always buy support for MySQL no matter what “edition“ you‘re using, we don‘t “cripple“ it, the same version you get for free (both $$$ and in terms of software freedom via the GPL) is the same that someone buying a license for it gets. You can purchase support for either the GPL or Commercially-licensed versions, or go out on your own via the mailing lists and forums, etc.
So, XE, “free, to a point“, but “very expensive afterwards?“...Reminds me a lot of that old commercial ”First you give it away free, then when they‘re hooked, make them paayyyy”.
