Just a week ago, at this year's Oracle OpenWorld, Larry Ellison announced the Always Free program, also available for companies. We immediately get 85,000 HUF worth of credit to spend, but there are big promises that even after the 30-day trial period, we can keep using the free services without restriction. We'll see.
This is quite good news for APEX developers — and for Oracle database users too — since we can use a full-fledged database and APEX environment on a cloud basis.
The only significant restriction is the 20GB storage limit, which, let's admit it, doesn't represent much of a compromise for application development.
Especially when we consider that this is not about cloud hosting of the usual Oracle XE edition (max. 12GB). Yes, I checked, I tried it, I can create a partitioned table, so it really is.
On the login page we can clearly see what free services the Always Free plan entitles us to:
- Create a VM instance
- Create a database
- Create a data warehouse
Clicking to create a database sets up our own database in about 5 minutes, which we can later make into a paid tier should there be any issue with performance.
On the database, we can access the services shown in the image below:
The installer creates an ADMIN user/schema with fairly strong rights. We can create schemas, and the range of system privileges is also quite wide. It's worth running the select * from dba_sys_privs SQL statement.
I have to admit, the web version of SQL Developer turned out quite polished, though it lags well behind the JDK-based version in terms of functionality, it's quite usable. I particularly like its intelligent error detection.
As for the APEX instance, I found it a bit odd how limited the INTERNAL workspace functions are, especially that I cannot centrally manage the users of already created workspaces. Oh well.
All in all, we're facing some real excitement, since even the still relatively cheap APEX hosting services aren't free, and without exception, they all run on Oracle XE. Let's not count the free workspaces available on apex.oracle.com here, since there we don't have external access to the database.
A lot also depends on what Oracle's support is like. Although there's a tempting link to chat in many places, I haven't tried it.
