I expected OracleXE 11g announcement at OOW 2010. It didn’t happen. Naturally, I start questioning if OracleXE is perhaps a dead end. Hopefully not, according to this good news. I think XE 11g will be released in the first half of 2011. Another good news, according to the same source, is that Oracle will raise DB size limit from 4GB to 10GB. Perhaps 10GB is not much in your part of the World, but I live and work in a small country where almost every official register (Business Register, Register of Territorial Units, Tax register, Population Census etc.) can individually be stored in database with 10GB limit. That doesn’t mean XE should be used casually as a production database for such tiny databases (registers). On the other hand, public sector should strive to save the money when it can — in most cases XE is perfectly suited to support dissemination of such data to public and/or for exchange in data hubs between register owners.