Oracle has an excellent database product, but they have been loosing database market share since 2013. Incidentally, that’s about the same time as they stopped providing updated versions of the free Oracle Express Edition database.
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It didn’t seem to worry Oracle, who happily discontinued the reasonably-priced Standard Edition One database and replaced it with SE2, which had half the power and twice the cost. Many independent Oracle enthusiasts (including me) told Oracle this worried us, but our pleas fell on deaf ears.
It is becoming clear that Oracle is still lagging far behind in the cloud and will never catch up. As e.g. Synergy Research Group shows, they are a small niche player and growing slower than the cloud market.
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That might have been what prompted them to rediscover the database and finally release a new 18c version of the free Oracle Express Edition (XE) database.
This is seriously good news for anybody who needs a database. The new 18c XE database is much improved over the previous versions and has a lot of the advanced features otherwise only found in the expensive enterprise edition. Of course, it has technical limitations: 2 cores, 2GB RAM, 12 GB user data. But the license agreement makes it clear that you can freely use it in production (except that “You will not use the Program for … development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction.” Image may be NSFW.
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With this powerful product, Oracle developers and DBAs finally have a real contender in the database discussions recently dominated by MySQL and PostgreSQL.
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