Developers: “Express Yourself” Part 1

Seems that Oracle are taking a leaf out of the many open source database projects and releasing a community version of there 10g database called Oracle 10g Express Edition, also known as XE

Basically this gives you many (not all) of the features of 10g on a very limited licence, like a different/limited administration toolset, no clustering or multiprocessor support and limited storage capacity to name a few, but essentially the core database is much the same, well from a developers perspective anyway.

One of the attractive features of XE is that its small enough to be installed on a developers workstation, thus not tying down resources otherwise managed by a wider group, normally involving DBAs and such. XE is excellent for you early development and “crash and burn” design prototyping.

The management tool they supply isn’t that bad actually, its web based so a plus for remote administration without the need to install a client. If you look past the clunky-ness of webforms, it does pretty much everything you would ask, including basic import and export of data

Getting database tools like Toad to work with XE isn’t too much hassle, but if you have previously installed an older Oracle Client you might need to modify the path statement so that the XE drivers take precedence over the older bin files, also you’d need to modify the .ora file accordingly. So far I have been using XE with Toad 8.5 and Crystal Reports 11 with no issue.

You can download XE from this location for the windows version.

http://download.oracle.com/otn/nt/oracle10g/xe/OracleXE.exe

For Part 2 of “Express Yourself” I plan to talk about MS SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and the suite of other Express tools that work with it.