It sounded like an April 1st joke as Kris Rice announced the release of the long awaited Oracle XE 11g Beta Version.

On OTN you can download either a Windows Installer or a Linux Installer (no mac version there).

In short the limitations of XE 11g:

• only one CPU is used
• only one installation of XE per Computer
• up to 11 gigabyte of user-data is allowed ! (XE10 had only 4GB)
• only 1 GB RAM is used (at most)
• no HTTPS with the built in EPG

I decided to use one of my idle Windows XP PCs and started with reading the installation guide.

The only thing i had to enter during the installation was a password for my SYS and SYSTEM DB Users, the rest went with the defaults.

Just a couple minutes later XE 11g was up and running :-)

The first thing i did was allowing remote access to the new and shiny graphical admin interface. Simply enter this command “EXEC DBMS_XDB.SETLISTENERLOCALACCESS(FALSE);” when connected to SQLPLUS as SYS or SYSTEM.

With the URL http://<hostname>:8080/apex/f?p=4950 you can start the graphical admin interface of your XE 11g database.

See the pictures, it looks really great!

And to make it even better, this is the latest and hottest release of APEX you can get!

What do you wait for? Go get it.

If you encounter any problems installing or using this beta version of Oracle XE 11g please report in the XE 11g Beta Forum.