Lucian@lastdot.org wrote:

...

I'm no Oracle user/expert, but isn't Oracle DB 11g free (as in beer)? So my take is he's not paying anything.

pierce@hogranch.com wrote:

AFAIK, its only free for your initial development work. As soon as you deploy a production app, you have to get support, and as soon as you have a support contract, you can no longer run any free instances, except the lightweight 'express' version which is limited to very small databases with only a few connections and doesn't have any of the enterprise functions.

Let me absolutely clear on this, when I say 'production' I'm speaking about my personal home network only. This network consists of a very few machines with very limited access to the outside world. I use it for my education and experience only. So production, to me, is a environment I don't want to update more than once a year.

Thanks, Gene Poole