Oracle gets into the "Express Edition" game

As the latte kicks in this morning, I thought this was interesting. With Microsoft touting their free line of Visual Studio Express and SQL Server 2005 Express products to get developers interested in building .NET systems, it seems Oracle has finally broken down and done the same thing.

They now have an entry-level database with a small footprint and of course, free (not sure if that’s free as in speech or free as in beer, as I always get confused when beer is involved). Built on the same code base as Oracle Database 10g Release 2 so if you’re building apps or want to maintain compatibilty with the big, bad, expensive machine called Oracle then this might be for you.

Here’s the rather bizzare link to download your own copy (the original link I got redirected about a million times to this page, gotta love those crazy database guys).

Enjoy!