Oracle has finally joined the bandwagon of creating an express edition of its database server! This is great news to those that want to foray into new uncharted waters of using an Oracle DB. Myself I have only used SQL Server databases, the first one being version 7.0 and finally ending up with SQL Server 2005. So this will be a totally new experience for me.

The benefits of using this express edition of the Oracle database is that it will be far easier for software developers to create products that use the Oracle database as its backend. Also for students this means having an actual database to kick around instead of having to Telnet into a database in order to learn the subject matter.

There seems to be few limitations to this database as it can hold up to 4GB of user data and use up to 1GB of RAM. This seems plenty for what this database is designed for which is mainly for students and small DB backends for ISV’s to use as their database of choice.

At this moment the product is only in Beta so I am going to wait until it is fully released before I install it on my machine. I have a rule of never installing beta products on my machine because of the probability of having my computer getting fried. Not a pleasant situation believe me.

You can learn more about this release here.