October 28, 2005 6:28 PM PDT
Oracle to offer free database
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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.
The latest edition is the same as other databases in Oracle's lineup but is limited in usage. It can only run servers with one processor, with 4GB of disk space and 1GB of memory. Oracle on Friday offered a beta version of the new database for Windows and Linux on its Oracle Technology Network Web site.
The new low-end edition is aimed squarely at free and open-source alternatives to Oracle's namesake database, said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Oracle's server technologies division.
Open-source databases have caught on steadily in popularity over the past few years with corporate customers and Web developers.
MySQL is the most popular open-source database among developers, according to a recent Evans Data study. IBM earlier this month released a free version of its own DB2 database as part of a PHP development package. And Microsoft intends to ship a free version of SQL Server 2005, called Express, next month.
"There is definitely a market there (for low-end databases) and a demand. And we want them to be using Oracle and not MySQL or SQL Server Express," Mendelsohn said. "It's definitely a reaction to the market interest."
About a year and a half ago, Oracle introduced Oracle 10g Standard Edition One, a version aimed at mid-size companies where Microsoft has many customers. That database is limited to two processors and cost $149 per user.
By introducing a free entry-level product, Oracle intends to get more developers and students familiar with its namesake database, Mendelsohn said. Those customers, Oracle hopes, will eventually upgrade to a higher-end version.
"Even though the database is initially free, standards progress and those university students who are playing with the database today will eventually be working at corporations and making product decisions," he said. "We want to have mind-share with those people."
The Express Edition database can be distributed with other products. It will be available through Oracle's developer network and include a Web-based administration console development tools.
Separately, Mendelsohn offered comments on what Oracle intends to do with InnoDB, a storage engine for the MySQL database that Oracle acquired earlier this month.
He said Oracle intends to extend a contract with MySQL where the InnoDB storage engine is packaged with MySQL.
"There are all kinds of possibilities we're exploring," Mendelsohn said. "You might be seeing it showing up in Oracle products."
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databases have other advantages other than cost:
they take few system resources, they are much
simpler to install and manage than Oracle, and
things like PostgreSQL have lots of features not
found in Oracle (multiple language stored
procedures, basic array types, user defined types
and operators, etc.).
Honestly, if you are the proverbial college
student tinkering with databases as part of some
project, are you going to go with the
uniprocessor 4G max Oracle DB that takes up 700M
of disk space and 100M of RAM to run and has
fewer bindings and support for applications, or
the open-source alternative included with your
Linux distribution that runs fully SMP without
limits on database size, takes just 8M to run,
and lets you write stored procedures in C, PERL,
Python, Ruby, and Java?
But up to 4GB disk space and 1 processor? come on! MySQL and PostgreSQL both gives much better value then whats oracle gives..
Someone at Oracle is clearly understimate the open source competing package and thought that by throwing a bone to the community, Oracle will catch up, but thats a very bad offer to this community.
I think Lite will also be a boon for students in countries like India, where per capita income is much lower. This is clearly a growth market for Oracle, as outsourcing countinues to shift technology jobs from the U.S. to India and China. In fact, I think Oracle should not waste their time on the U.S. student market at all, and just focus on India. This is truly the "new economy".
If you want to install it on an MS box it takes but a few clicks. Any neophyte can handle that.
If you start talking about RAC, DataGuard or any of the advanced configurations, then there is a learning curve. The wages better be high, those are mission critical scenarios.
I do agree that the open source options are taking market share away at smaller shops. I guess that's why they are moving into apps.
The MySQL or Postgres market is not a low end Oracle market, and making a limited version of Oracle available will just look silly. The choice point on Oracle versus Open Source is based on commercial stability and support, not price.
What Oracle has to concentrate on now is their non database market, which is dying on the vine due to lack of execution on Oracle's part.
This affects every aspect of Oracles market and gives competitors a entry point to wean customers from their database market and also blocks opportunities like thier advanced technical services business.
Take the portal business, for example. If you wnat an open source J2EE based portal, well, the major players are Jetspeed (relatively basic), Exo (with a GPL contaminating it), Liferay (very slow and poorly documented, but otherwise alright), GridSphere (fast, but not Pluto based and with funding and business focus uncertainties), and Pentaho (new, uncertain, and based on JBOSS) Not a really good choice in the bunch.
And in the commercial sector, Oracle Portal is losing badly to WebSphere Portal. This is especially embarassing to Oracle, since Oracle Portal is one of the oldest and most mature portals, and should have been dominating the market.
The problem is that Oracle appears, at least, to have spent little effort or resources at productizing Oracle Portal, so only the most experienced developers can take advantage of it's capabilities in an enterprise setting.
At the very least, Oracle could have produced a decent set of documentation, some Eclipse plugin's , a few missing portlets and cleaned up the worst of the "mysterious hacks" needed to get it going in a real world environment.
For a fraction of what they paid for InnoDB, which doesn't do ANYTHING for their competitive position, Oracle could have an industry leading portal, with all that implies to their competitiveness and cross selling capabilities.
The same issues apply to most of Oracles non database offerings. Fixing those issues is where Oracle could most effectively be spending their resources.
What do Oracle, Microsoft, and SUN have in common? They get chills everytime they here the words open source. Since Open Source has become a viable business model all three of those companies have started trying to compete with it by either creating their own open/shared source, free, or cut rate products.
I think it will be interesting to see what the future holds for all of these companies.
Most people who would use this database, want it to support a website.
Oracle let Microsoft dominate the ISP world. You can barely find an ISP that does Oracle hosting cheap. I used to have one, but they eventually decided to get rid of Oracle due to licensing reasons.
If I want to create a web app, I'll use what my ISP has. Either mySQL, Postgress, or SQL Server.
Although I'm a professional Oracle DBA, I cannot use Oracle for my own personal web applications because my ISP and most others don't offer Oracle as an option.
The Oracle licensing genius who let this happen should be fired.
Microsoft beat Apple in the early days because Apple sold people what they needed and Microsoft sold them what they thought they wanted. Big difference, and Microsoft is still at it, only problem is Oracle sells what companies need
Rekall. Why would one one to use msaccess gui to interface if we really want something from theopensource for free 100%? That meants we have to install postgresql and rekall separately to use it. Its a good try for Oracle 10g though where it comes with gui for interface in one installation,but the space requirement is really too bigh compare to those of postgresql.
It will be leverage furthere for Postgresql with a itself a gui to interface and add forms for data
inputing and retrieving.
Why not if its free for Oracle 10g ? But the many other things we really have to consider that 4/1 GB limit , right? Thats meants the lower end database engines still have their advantage over big disk space and rams to be use, and be tough for Oracle 10g to on Par ? !
Newbie