Chapter 1. Database Editions and Oracle Database XE
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. - Henry Ford
This chapter briefly introduces various database editions offered by Oracle Database 11g, and then introduces Oracle Database XE. We will dive into a list of features supported by Oracle Database XE and also discuss the limitations imposed on Oracle Database XE. The topics that will be covered in this chapter are as follows:
Available database editions
Oracle Database Express Edition
About Oracle
Oracle Corporation is a computer technology company established in 1977. Oracle specializes in developing enterprise software products. Oracle provides database management systems (such as Oracle Database, MySQL, and TimesTen), database development tools (such as Oracle Developer Suite and JDeveloper), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, and so on. With the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle has emerged as a hardware vendor offering Sun hardware under its umbrella.
In the words of Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, "Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system — applications to disk — where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability, and security go up." Read the complete story about "Oracle Buys Sun" at http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/018363.
Available database editions
Oracle Database 11g is available in five editions, namely Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, Standard Edition One, Express Edition (XE) , and Personal Edition. All editions are built on the same code base. This means we can easily scale up Oracle Express Edition to Standard Edition One to Standard Edition to Enterprise Edition.
To scale up to a higher edition, we would install the new software, open the database in the new edition, run the catalog.sql and catproc.sql scripts, and recompile the stored procedures. This topic is covered in greater detail later in the book.
Personal Edition: Personal Edition is available on the Windows platform and it supports single-user development environments.
Express Edition (XE): XE is a small footprint database. It does not require license from Oracle to develop applications on XE. You can deploy and distribute XE freely without paying a penny as a license fee to Oracle. Database features such as Automatic Memory Management (AMM), Advanced Queuing (AQ) , Flashback query, and Data Encryption are supported with XE. There are a few limitations on XE, which we will explore later in the chapter. Support is provided through a free Oracle Discussion Forum (https://forums.oracle.com/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=251&start=0).
Standard Edition One (SEO): SEO is a low cost and full featured database for servers. It provides all database features available with XE and adds a few more to its list. SEO is available on Windows, Linux, and UNIX platforms. As a license fee you pay $900 to Oracle (for five users) and start using SEO. You pay an additional $180 per user if required. The pricing information provided here is subject to change; refer to Oracle's Global Pricing and Licensing for more details (http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/index.html). Database features such as Java Support, Enterprise Manager and Automatic Storage Management (ASM) are included in SEO.
Standard Edition (SE): SE is an affordable edition of Oracle database. It is a full-featured database for servers up to four sockets. It can easily scale to Enterprise Edition as demand grows. Database features supported by Standard Edition One are supported by SE and it adds few more to its list. Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Automatic Workload Management (AWM) are two additional database features supported by Standard Edition.
You pay $1,750 to Oracle towards a license fee, which includes a license for five users. You pay an additional $350 per user if required. It is also compatible with Enterprise Edition and can easily grow with demand. Refer to the Oracle's Global Pricing and Licensing document for more details.
Enterprise Edition (EE): This edition of Oracle database comes with a range of database options. EE provides industry leading performance, scalability, and security to your database. With Enterprise Edition you get database features such as Total Recall, Active Data Guard, Flashback Database, Real Application Clusters One-Node, Database Vault, Virtual Private Database, and many other that are not found in other database editions. An additional licensing cost is associated with these database features refer to Oracle's Global Pricing and Licensing for more details.
