Oracle 10g has a new feature, the scheduler. It’s the matured version of DBMS_JOBS. What I just found out, is that Oracle XE (I installed beta 2) contains this scheduler as well. I found that a nice surprise. A job scheduler probably would fit in 4GB of userdata, and for smaller to mid-sized installations running the back-end database on one CPU would not be a problem. One could install a multi-processor system so, that Oracle XE runs on one CPU, and the processes started by the scheduler on (one of the) other(s). Developing this job-scheduler (as an alternative front-end to Oracle Enterprise Manager, with more features of course) in JDeveloper 10.1.3 and you have yourselves a platform independent job-scheduler. And scalable to your likings.
Please credit this blogentry if you build such a program (in Help->About) (-;