Hello, I'm the new product manager for Oracle Database XE

Gerald Venzl-Oracle

Hi everybody,

My name is Gerald Venzl and I'm the new product manager for Oracle Database XE, which is being released again with the Oracle Database 18c release later this summer.

I would like to thank the great team here that has provided community support for XE over all these years and hopefully continue to do so going forward!

Along with the great team of community experts as well as Oracle employees I'm looking forward to help you getting the most out of Oracle Database!

Update: As we are going through extensive testing of 18c XE, we have found some issues in the latest Release Candidate that we consider being too severe for XE to be released prior to fixing them.

We want to make sure that XE has the highest possible quality and is a rock solid Oracle Database edition.

Because of that we have decided to delay the release of 18c XE until the October Release Update (18c RU4).

18c XE will be released as 18c RU4, instead of 18c RU3 as originally planned.

We apologize for the delay and hope for your understanding that better quality is worth the extra wait.

Thanks,

Gerald

L. Fernigrini

Those are excellent news!

Just remember that south of the equator line we we are just starting the winter, so summer is still 6 months ahead

Gerald Venzl-Oracle

Fair enough! I should have said "later this summer on the northern hemisphere and where there is such a thing as summer."

Gaz in Oz

Hello.

oelk0

Hello,

I'm very excited about upcomming Express Edition 18.

My wishes:

- Support more linux distributions, openSUSE.

- place the system settings inside /etc/sysctl.d/<file>  the calculation (script) in XE11 didn't work correct for example in openSUSE.

- make clear statements in the documentation about licencing, for example

  can i use it in virtualization envornments?

  can i use ADDM, AWR, diagnostic and tuning, autospace advisor ect ? This is included in XE11 but not allowed (?)

Best regards.

Mike Decker

Hello. Will Java be supported in this release of XE?

Gerald Venzl-Oracle

Thanks for your feedback oelk0,

Some of these we are planning on addressing, some of them might have to wait until 19c XE.

On the forefront we are working on making the licensing of XE even simpler as before.

All features in XE are allowed and free to use!

Thx,

Denis Savenko

Hello, @Gerald Venzl-Oracle! Great to see you here!

Can you clarify some really important things about the future of XE releases?

We all know that 11g XE never received any patches and updates (even the security patches) and that was extremely frustrating for the community!

So, the question is - did Oracle change their policy here in 2k18? Are the new versions of XE (such as 18c XE) going to recieve updates and patches which improve user experience working with the DBMS (at least a minimal set of them fixing bugs and security issues)?

Maybe not patches, but new versions? Did the XE team developed some mechanisms to build new XE versions of Oracle Database continiously by clicking on a button (we are in the CI/CD era, you know) based on the most recent (or maybe not the very most, but current) revision of the EE of the DBMS?

What is the schedule for the upcoming XE versions? Will we see, let's say, 18c release 2, 19c, 19c release 2 and so on, let's say, every half a year like many vendors do these days? We understand that these new releases would contain much fewer changes, but still, we'd have actual versions of the DBMS in this fast-changing world.

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P.S. I think it would be really great to pin this thread.

Gerald Venzl-Oracle

Hi Denis,

The policy around patches has not changed, XE will not be patchable.

However, going forward there will be new versions of XE with every version of the Oracle Database.

Meaning that there will be a 19c XE, 20c XE, 21c XE and so forth, releasing annually alongside the SE2 and EE editions.

From that point of view users get a lot of features and fixes over a much shorter period of time than they used to.

Another big change to XE going forward is that we will include almost all Single Instance functionality so that the users get a fully capable Oracle Database with all the great features that make Oracle the #1 database on the planet.

It will be fully compatible with SE2 and EE so that a PDB from XE can, for example, just be unplugged and plugged into EE or the Oracle Cloud without any export/import, etc. required.

Fair enough, will pin the thread

Gerald Venzl-Oracle

My wishes:- Support more linux distributions, openSUSE.- place the system settings inside /etc/sysctl.d/<file>  the calculation (script) in XE11 didn't work correct for example in openSUSE.- make clear statements in the documentation about licencing, for example  can i use it in virtualization envornments?  can i use ADDM, AWR, diagnostic and tuning, autospace advisor ect ? This is included in XE11 but not allowed (?)

1) Is that still an actual need in the times of VirtualBox and Docker containers? I.e. would it not be enough to just have it available inside a Docker container that can be run on openSUSE and Ubuntu?

2) This seems to be a derivative of 1, or?

3) We are actively working on making the licensing as simple and clear as possible

3b) You will be able to use everything that 18c XE ships and so are you in 11g XE. Why are you saying that you are not allowed to use these features?

HarbourGhost

"You will be able to use everything that 18c XE ships and so are you in 11g XE. Why are you saying that you are not allowed to use these features?"

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17781_01/license.112/e18068/toc.htm#XELIC101

The following options and major features are not included with Oracle Database XE:

• Oracle Diagnostic Pack
• ....
• Oracle Tuning Pack

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/license.112/e47877/options.htm#DBLIC165

Oracle Diagnostics Pack includes the following features:

• Automatic Workload Repository
• Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM)
• Active Session History (ASH)
• Performance monitoring (database and host)
• Event notifications: notification methods, rules, and schedules
• Event history and metric history (database and host)
• Blackouts
• Dynamic metric baselines
• Monitoring templates
• Memory-access based performance monitoring
• Supporting functionality to perform per stream bottleneck detection and per component top wait event analysis
• Execution of the Real Application Testing 'Replay Compare Period Report'

Oracle Tuning Pack includes the following features:

• SQL Access Advisor
• SQL Tuning Advisor
• Automatic SQL Tuning
• SQL Monitoring
• Reorganize objects

It was always unclear because they were "included" as part of the software but they were not "included" in the license.