XE: Oracle XE is in production now!

Oracle Express Edition has been released on 02/24/2006 and is in production now.

You can download the software here: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/database/xe/index.html

The downloads come in two flavours: A Western European Edition and an Universal Edition

• Oracle Database 10g Express Western European Edition - Single-byte LATIN1 database for Western European language storage, with the Database Homepage user interface in English only. The character set is WE8MSWIN1252.

• Oracle Database 10g Express Universal Edition - Multi-byte Unicode database for all language deployment, with the Database Homepage user interface available in the following languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. The character set is AL32UTF8.

There is also a separate download of a

• Oracle Database 10g Express Client
  Client software to be installed on client systems for remotely accessing Oracle Database 10g Express Edition.

But you can just as well connect to Oracle Express Edition just like any other Oracle Database using SQL*Net.

The downloads are available for both Windows and Linux x86 platforms. The software is not installed using the standard Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) but uses the native installers, Microsoft Installer packages and RPMs for Linux. Specific Debian packages will be released shortly.

~Dietmar.