New free developer version of the next-gen Oracle Database 23c!
blogs.oracle.com
blogs.oracle.com
My best guess is engineers who are not currently employed, but who would like to up specifically their Oracle skills, as opposed to other valuable alternatives like Postgres.
Am I missing something?
It's a smaller and smaller audience, because of cloud taking over, but someone still needs it.
Oracle thank you for that one!
If you really are a student (lol), good luck making a living as an infra consultant in the Oracle space, man. It's a dying field.
Sure, Postgres is much easier to setup and tune (because it does much less compared to Oracle anyway), but it's not going to dethrone Oracle anytime soon when it comes to powering the most demanding OLTP workloads (like stock exchanges and telecom) out there.
XE was released to match SQLServer Express, which in turn was released because MySQL and PostgreSQL were eating their lunch among small dev shops (they still are). Nowadays nobody cares, unless they have to maintain some legacy product.