The sincerest form of flattery ….
With the release of MySQL 5, with Stored-Procs, triggers, XA and other great stuff, it is now, at long last a truly relational DB. Oracle, the 500 lb gorilla in the DB market, has answered by releasing a free version Oracle. Remember this is free as in beer, not free as in freedom.
Oracle intends to release a free version of its database, a reaction to the growing competitive pressure from low-end open-source databases.
The database heavyweight on Tuesday is 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. It is targeted at students, small organizations and software vendors that could embed the Oracle database with an application.
I still don’t see why low end user would consider Oracle of MySQL. The license, and the software puts limits on the number of processors, the amount of memory, you can use to for this product. This what is wrong with the Oracle pricing model to begin with. With More’s law in effect hardware prices trend down ward. Making upgrades in hardware the least expensive way to ad capacity. Oracle want to put the debacle on that. Or get a piece of that. Anyway, I think if Oracle really want people to start using this they should target the product to hosting sites, producing a totally unrestricted version, minus the more exotic bells and whistles.
Dap: ./
