Oracle 11g Express Edition (XE)

Oracle 11g XE represents the compact and high-speed relational DBMS using the code from a packet of Oracle 11g of Release 2, – the first version of this commercial platform was issued in 2007.

The Oracle company intends to collect responses of developers about the beta as the XE version and similar to it free products are the good test platform for testing of new technologies without huge runtime royalty fees. By itself, in a packet of Oracle 11g of Express Edition there is not enough set of functions and options thanks to which the flagman Oracle 11g platform is one of the main tools for creating applications of industrial level.

In particular, the packet of Oracle 11g XE does not contain functions for ensuring the increased availability, including automatic restoration of the damaged blocks and recovery of tabular spaces on the chosen timepoint. Also in the XE version there are no tools for scaling of the application, such as technology of a clustering of Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters).

Among other things, in the XE version there are no such security protections as the detailed audit, the protected Oracle Database Vault storage and technology of enciphering SecureFiles Encryption. Also the Oracle company excluded from free DBMS of function for performance improvement, including caching of requests on client side, caching of a DB in RAM and support of own software platform of Exadata for storage of large volumes of data.

For developers who are going to implement applications on the basis of Oracle 11g XE DBMS there are also purely technical restrictions – no more than 11 GB for user data and no more than 1 GB of RAM for use directly the application. To receive additional hardware and program resources in the order, developers should use paid versions.

Though technical restrictions do a packet of Oracle 11g XE by quite useless product for practical work in large scales, this platform clearly demonstrates development of technologies – this DBMS much quicker, more powerfully and more conveniently, than the best commercial DBMS 20 years ago. Besides, for certain there will be small organizations to which there will be quite enough opportunities and this cut-down version.