Can one use Oracle 10g XE in commercial enviroment

As of July 21, 2010 Oracle has not yet released Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) for 11g. But there is available Oracle database 10g XE and many ones use it for their personal use as Enterprise Edition of Oracle is really expensive. Now many ones think whether one can use Oracle database 10g XE for their commercial environment.

It is true that Oracle 10g XE comes with many limitations and also has less features compared to Oracle database Enterprise Edition (EE). But there is no restriction about where you can use it or not. So in the commercial environment you can use Oracle database 10g XE but have following limitation while using it.

1. It can have a single instance on any server.

2. You can install it on a multiple CPU server, but it can only be executed on one processor in any server.

3. XE only supports up to 4GB of user data (not including XE system datafile data.)

4. XE can only use up to 1 GB RAM of available memory.

So if your settings/environmental satisfies/follows above 4 limitations, you can use XE at your commercial environment without any problems.

Along with above limitations in XE there is many others limitations in terms of features/option. Such as the following features is not included in XE.

Major Features not included in XE
1) Oracle Real Application Clusters

2) Oracle Spatial

3) Advanced Security Option

4) Oracle Label Security

5) Oracle Partitioning

6) Oracle OLAP

7) Oracle Data Mining

8) Oracle Enterprise Manager

9) Oracle Change Management Pack

10) Oracle Configuration Management Pack

11) Oracle Diagnostic Pack

12) Oracle Tuning Pack

13) Oracle Clusterware

14) Oracle Connection Manager

15) Oracle Names

16) Oracle Streams (Apply process only)

17) Oracle Workflow

18) Messaging Gateway

19) Oracle Data Guard

20) Oracle Fail Safe

21) Ultra Search

22) interMedia

23) Oracle Workspace Manager

Application Development, Language, and Database Features not included in 10g XE

1) iSQL*Plus
2) Database Web services
3) Java support in the database
4) Java Server Pages
5) Java native compilation
6) SQLJ
7) XQuery, JNDI, or Servlet support
8) Data Compression
9) Bitmapped index, bitmapped join index
10) Summary Management
11) Materialized View Query Rewrite
12) Parallel query/DML
13) Parallel statistics gathering
14) Parallel index build/scans
15) Parallel export/import

Backup and Recovery Features not included in XE
1) Online schema reorganization/redefinition
2) Flashback Table
3) Flashback Database
4) Flashback Transaction Query
5) Server-managed backup and recovery
6) Backup Unused Block Compression
7) Backup Encryption
8) In case of Incremental backup and recovery does not support change tracking file or optimized incremental backup capability.
9) Duplexed backup sets
10) Fast-Start Selectable Recovery Time
11) Block-level media recovery
12) Parallel backup and recovery
13) Point-in-time tablespace recovery
14) Trial recovery
15) Rolling Upgrade Support – Patch Set, Database and O/S

Security & Manageability Features not included in 10g XE
1) Virtual Private Database
2) Fine grained auditing

3) Automatic Storage Management
4) Database Resource Manager

Data Movement/Integration Features not included in XE
1) Synchronous Change Data Capture
2) Asynchronous Change Data Capture
3) Transportable tablespaces, including cross-platform
4) Advanced Replication
5) Transparent Gateways

Networking Features not included in Oracle 10g XE
1) Directory connectivity.