Cool. It’s good to see Oracle giving back like this. While I am not sure what them giving away a free version of their database will mean for sure, I suspect it will be well received none the less.

The database heavyweight on Tuesday is expected to announce the beta release of Oracle 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE), which will be generally available by the end of the year. It is targeted at students, small organizations and software vendors that could embed the Oracle database with an application.

The latest edition is the same as other databases in Oracle’s lineup but is limited in usage. It can only run servers with one processor, with 4GB of disk memory and 1GB of memory.

The new low-end edition is aimed squarely at free and open-source alternatives to Oracle’s namesake database, said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Oracle’s server technologies division. [Read the rest]

Tags: database, oracle, oracle 10g express, oracle database xe