Database Wisdom: Oracle

Oracle currently offers three production versions of its database product: 9i, 10g and 11g.

1. Oracle 9i is approaching its end of life and there is no reason to download or use it unless you have some pre-existing application that you must maintain compatibility with.

2. Oracle 10g release 2 is still the most common production environment. This is the currently shipping Oracle's Express Edition (XE) version. To be compatible with more applications, you may want to download and use Oracle 10g Release 2. Oracle XE is the database that I will be documenting for the rest of this book.

3. Oracle 11g is the latest and greatest Oracle release. Oracle is pushing 11g as the new standard and over time it will become the new standard. If you have no particular reason to maintain backwards compatibility, and you need more features than offered by XE, I would recommend that you go with 11g.

I would recommend XE over 11g unless you really need the missing features or need to scale beyond its limitations.

Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (XE)

Oracle XEis a starter database offered by Oracle. It is an easy to install, easy to use, professional quality database. Some features of Oracle's pay-to-play databases are not included but all of the applications you write for XE will run on any of the pay databases.

Oracle XE is free to download, free to use and free to deploy. You can use it for your own personal uses or you can write commercial applications to sell, without paying anything. The database is limited in that you are only allowed to run it on a single CPU, only access 1GB of RAM and are restricted to 4GB of data. Oracle XE can be installed on any size machine and it will enforce these restrictions automatically.

Oracle XE runs on Windows and Linux. It only comes as a 32-bit distribution but will well on a 64-bit system. The database installs as an MSI on windows and as a rpm or deb file in linux (depending on the flavor of Unix chosen).

Standard Edition One

Oracle 11g Standard Edition One is the next step up from Oracle XE. It is a somewhat limited edition of the database that comes at a cheaper price, $149 per user at a 5 user minimum, or 5k per CPU socket for a max of 2 sockets. If you need to scale beyond two sockets, you will need to upgrade to either Oracle 11g Standard or Oracle 11g Enterprise. Standard Edition One is not otherwise limited; you can use as much memory or disk as you need. Enterprise class features (such as partitioning, advanced data protection, advanced compression, etc) are not available.

Standard

Coming Soon!

Enterprise

Coming Soon!

Personal

Coming Soon!