Niall's Oracle Pages

Wim was the first with the news that Oracle will release a free version of the Oracle 10g R2 database, to be called Oracle Express Edition. You can grab yourself a copy for either Linux (hence Wim's interest) or Windows (hence mine) from OTN here.

There are some interesting features of this product on first viewing.

It doesn't use the Universal Installer, on windows it uses the Windows Installer mechanism. On Linux it uses the rpm mechanism and comes pre-linked.

HTMLDB has been chosen as the admin utility - rather shows up dbconsole in my view (though of course it is less capable)

You can even do basic performance monitoring in rather a neat fashion. This is a top-sql type screen drilled down to a 'problem' statement

Then again there are some interesting caveats. Wim's summary, but emphasis mine,

basically free database, using native installer, free redistributable, can run it production if you want but the code has some built-in restrictions..
I've not had much time to run through the docs, which can be found at the otn XE homepage here but this in the known issues did surprise me a little.
The Backup Database and Restore Database commands under Oracle Database 10g Express Edition in the Start menu do not work in the Beta release.

Workaround: Instead of backing up the database, consider exporting its data to an external file, then importing it back into the database when you need it. Oracle Database Express Edition 2 Day DBA Guide discusses several methods you can use to export and import data.
Ho-hum export/import as a backup strategy. As an aside in my install the commands didn't work because they weren't actually there. I don't know if this is a doc bug or a quirk of my install. You can access the database from a full 10g home, so it may well be that rman will be able to backup the database in a production environment.

On a multi-homed machine and, presumably because the install doesn't use OUI, the Oracle home selection tab in OUI doesn't know about the new XE home, which has got prepended to the system path. if you want to install this as another Oracle product then you'll need potentially to do some path editing or setup an oraenv.bat type script.

Most of the commentary so far has commented on this as stiff competition for open-source databases, this may be true though I do wonder whether a company as large and powerful and profitable as Oracle will ever really win the hearts and minds of the open-source crowd. I do however see this as potentially a real competitor for SQLServer Express edition (I can't believe the name was entirely coincidental).

Both products

Integrate directly with VS.Net and have CLR stored proc capability

Have identical hardware restrictions (1cpu,1gb ram, 4gb data)

Are released in the VS.Net 2005 timeframe

The SqlServer express homepage is here. Sound familiar?