Oracle recently announced 10G express database edition with a lot of fanfare. This edition of Oracle 10g (Oracle Database XE) is an entry-level, small-footprint database based on the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 code base that's free to develop, deploy, and distribute.There are no database license costs associated with developing applications for Oracle Database XE which offers the complete integrated set of Oracle Database programming interfaces including SQL, PL/SQL, Java, C, and PHP, Windows .Net, Oracle HTML DB, C++, ODBC, OLE DB

Oracle Database XE is a great starter database for various applications including Open Source applications that leverage PHP, Java etc. Any application developed for Oracle Database XE will run completely unchanged with Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One, Standard Edition, or Enterprise Edition.

Oracle Database XE is available for 32-bit Linux and Windows operating systems and comes complete with its own management browser interface to monitor database activity and manage database users, storage, and memory. This product can be installed on any host but the product will store up to 4GB of user data and use upto 1 GB of memory and 1 cpu on the host that its installed on

This provides the opportunity for ISV's to develop and deploy applications with a powerful database edition and then upgrade without complex data and application migrations. More information can be found at http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/xe/index.html