Oracle 11g XE at least a year away

It may be "a year or two" before Oracle releases a no-cost Express Edition (XE) of its 11g database, according to Andrew Mendelsohn, the company's senior vice president of database server technologies. That's because Oracle is going to wait until after the first patch set ships for Oracle 11gR2, which was launched in July, Mendelsohn said in a brief interview following a speech at Oracle's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Monday.

Some Oracle database administrators believe there is a deliberate reason for the protracted rollout. "It's an approach that ensures that adoption is nil," said Paul Vallée, founder of the Pythian Group, a database management outsourcing company in Ontario, Canada. "I don't think they're interested in adoption.... I think they have to have it out there just for maybe a check box, just to maybe say they have a free edition."

It's unclear how the arrival of Sun's MySQL will affect new XE, or any other aspect of Oracle's database strategy, Vallée said.

Oracle plans to increase investment in MySQL, CEO Larry Ellison said.

All future plans for Oracle database incoming releases can be retrieved through Metalink note 742060.1 "Release Schedule of Current Database Releases"