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Oracle To Offer A Free Database
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet News reports that Oracle is likely to announce a free version of its Oracle 10g Database. Oracle Database 10g Express Edition will be free for development and production use, and could even be distributed with other products. What does this mean for the future of MySQL and PostgreSQL?" From the article: "By introducing a free entry-level product, Oracle intends to get more developers and students familiar with its namesake database, Mendelsohn said. Those customers, Oracle hopes, will eventually upgrade to a higher-end version."
Unless Oracle puts together a better administration interface than the current bunch of tools people might actually learn to stay away from it.
The main reason I like MySQL is it works five minutes after I finish downloading it. And it's much smaller than Oracle so I can download it quickly. I spent two days trying to make Oracle work on an Linux box and it never did. The price ain't the only reason I like open source. :-)
So MySQL and PostgreSQL have been free... then IBM announces a free version of DB2... then Microsoft says it's going to release SQL Server Express for free. So Oracle is playing catch-up. I wouldn't expect a major migration from MySQL to anything else; the conversion costs would be too high. But in the future, choice is a good thing.
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Well, Oracle has always been freely available for non-production use.. They even mail out their entire range of software(DB, App server,dev tools etc) free of cost.
I once received 10g for linux, and the box had every latest release of Oracle software for Linux. They're quite developer-friendly; just as MS is. For production use however..
If you look at the EULA you will see that this has a time restriction. "...provided to you by Oracle solely for evaluation purposes until January 31, 2006."
Obviously this is just a ploy to get developers to write apps on Oracle then, when the application has gotten fat, they will have to pay the fees for a version of Oracle that can support the app or rewrite the whole thing.
I think that only good reason to obtain 10g is to learn Oracle. If I was working at a company that was moving to Oracle, or at least talking about it, I would DL this to learn it for improved job opportunities.
Just my $.02.
Oracle is a rubbish dinosaur that hasnt aged all that well
And this is insightful?
It's a baseless accusation. The poster doesn't even attempt to provide any proof for it. Oracle is continuously leads the pack in benchmarks, it has more features than you can shake a stick at, is incredibly stable, and has features that MySQL is just starting to catch up with (wow, MySQL finally got views! How wonderfully 1980s.)
coz IBM said if it dont do what you want, work round to it. Oracle said, ok we'll patch it.
So suddenly not adding features and refusing to respond to your userbase is a good thing? No wonder IBM's lost most of the market outside of mainframes and minis.
MySQL is excellent for what it is, a website database server
Well this much is true at least. But I still wouldn't use it much beyond a toy website. PostgreSQL or Firebird are better for the same price -- both in features and in stability/reliability.
cant see many php developers going to the trouble of using oracle
The trouble? You clearly don't know what you're talking about now. Oracle is far easier/better to write SQL for since it's both more flexible and closer to the SQL "standard" (and that's a pretty sad statement). There's also far more information out there for help with Oracle than there is with MySQL, not to mention that Oracle is something very useful to put on your resume/CV -- MySQL isn't totally unknown anymore, but Oracle is still better as far as that goes.
Now if you want to rightfully bash Oracle then talk about their miserable installer and bundled administration tools. They suck. They've always sucked. And they're not getting better IMO. Oracle's on a buying spree right now, and I so wish that they'd buy out Quest Software and bundle TOAD (Windows) or tORA (*nix) with their servers. The Java crap they use now blows. The other (and related) issue is that administering an Oracle server can be a daunting task, and there's not a great deal of (free) literature available for it. Oragle 10g has made strides here with the database doing a lot of self-fixing and tuning, but it could be better (or at least better documented). Of course, one reason that MySQL doesn't need as much here is because there simply as much that can be done to it. Flexibility has a price.