I am happy to announce that two of my fellow employees (from LogicaCMG) have entered and won the Rad Race at the JavaPolis. Congratulations go towards Pascal Alma and Pascal Prins who entered the contest with a toolbox filled with Oracle goodies. (Oracle JDeveloper, JHeadstart and ADF etc)
It is fair enough to mention that there are 2 other teams that have received the 1st price so congratulations also to the teams from Axi and Oracle.
It is interesting to see that 2 out of 3 winners have made it with the use of a Oracle product stack. Is this coincedence?
More details can be found on the website of JavaPolis.
While installing MySQL for development purposes I remembered an announcement from Oracle in which they introduced Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (aka Oracle XE). According to the announcement and the Oracle website, XE is an entry-level database based on the code base of it’s big brother (or sister) that is free to develop, deploy, and distribute.
It is a great database for:
- Developers working on PHP, Java, .NET, and Open Source applications (it looks that I am the target audience
).. - …etc..
According to the Oracle website it should be easy to install and administer! While MySQL is a wonderfull database, easy to install and maintain, good tooling support etc, I still decided to take the plunge into the scary world called Oracle!
The download of 150 MB was ready and after 5 minutes I got my database up and running. Is this all I wondered! Yep indeed this was all. I switched a Java project to use the Oracle XE database and everything went smoothly from then onwards.
I must admit Oracle XE has it all in one download from database to administration. So am I going to use XE from now on 
? Could be! It sure has made a very good impression on me. So thumbs up for Oracle. They released a fine database but that is something I should have been expecting.
And by the way.. talking to Oracle guys is not so scary after all
