I just realized about an interesting move from Oracle. They released a Beta version of their new Oracle Database 10g Express Edition.
This Express edition is free of charge. It is free not only for production use, but also for distribution.
These are the limitations it has:
- It restricts itself to use only one CPU
- Only one server and database instance (SID) per installation
- Database size limit of 4GB
Looks like a good deal for ISVs, developers and small shops. It's a good way for getting more mind-share among small software companies and younger/future developers.
I tried it on my Linux laptop and got it up and running in a couple of minutes. The Express name does not make it any lighter though: it still consumes a good chunk of RAM, and the database instance allocates 1GB of disk. So I'll stick to PostgreSQL for powering this blog :-). The only installer for Linux is an RPM archive. I'm using Fedora 4 and it worked just fine.
The pre-installation script checks for at least 1.5GB of swap space:
[root@sequoia local]$ rpm -Uvh oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-0.1.i386.rpm
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
This system does not meet the minimum requirements for swap space. Based on
the amount of physical memory available on the system, Oracle Database 10g
Express Edition requires 1515.0 MB of swap space. This system has 493 MB
of swap space. Configure more swap space on the system and retry the
installation.
error: %pre(oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-0.1.i386) scriptlet failed, exit status 1
error: install: %pre scriptlet failed (2), skipping oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-0.1
Since I don't (and won't) have that much space on my swap partition, I cheated by forcing RPM to skip the pre-condition script using the "--nopre" option ;-) :
[root@sequoia local]# rpm -Uvh --nopre oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-0.1.i386.rpm
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
1:oracle-xe ########################################### [100%]
Executing Post-install steps..........
You must run '/etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure' as root user to
configure the database.
After running the /etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure script, it was
up. The SID of the database it creates is "XE".
It did NOT create any application icons on my KDE 3.4.2 desktop as the documentation suggests. No big deal for me and it's a Beta anyway.
It also comes with
htmldb,
which is a handy web-based tool for administering Oracle and building
simple DB apps. Go to http://hostname:port/htmldb to
access it. The port, and the system user password are the ones
specified when running the above oracle-xe configure script.