No free lunch (or database?) from Oracle
One victim of Oracle’s increased focus on their applications business is the free Oracle Express Edition (XE) database. Still shipping in version 10g release 2 from 2005, Oracle has said that a new XE version will not be out for a year or two.
I originally believed that Oracle released this version in order to achieve increased developer mindshare (”if it’s free, I might as well use an Oracle database for my application”). But while Microsoft has released MS SQL Server Express Edition in version 2005, 2005 SP1, 2005 SP2, 2005 SP3, 2008, 2008 SP1, Oracle has doggedly kept Oracle XE at 2005 level. This makes it clear that for Oracle, this product serves mainly to check a box (”Free version: Check”).
The treatment of XE does make you wonder what would happen to MySQL under Oracle’s stewardship, should the Sun aquisition go through…