Oracle opens up

In hopes of stemming the massive explosion of open source database use, Oracle is preparing an “express” version of it’s Oracle Database 10g line: Oracle Database XE. Like many things on the web right now, it’s currently in beta, with a full release planned for late this year.

Courting the open source set is an interesting move for Oracle. PHP developers are the obvious target right now, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of the focus shifted to Rails developers in the near future.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the features/limitations:

• available for Windows or Linux
• stores up to 4GB of data
• will only use one processor (crippled to keep their Enterprise clients no doubt)
• will only use up to 1GB of RAM (ditto)
• upgradeable to other Oracle Database 10g editions (of course)

I haven’t downloaded it to play yet, but there seems to be some fairly detailed instructions on both install and integration on the PHP end.