Oracle XE has two major limitations that most database administrators would deem to be showstopper issues and not consider XE for use with multimedia. The first issue is the 11 GB database storage limit. If the decision is made to store all digital images outside the database and just use a BFILE or HTTP pointer to reference them, the database storage remaining that can be used for relational data is quite a large amount. An application with auditing can manage tens of thousands of images of any size. The administrator has to now manage backups of external files and deal with the potential for orphaned images, but can still manage a healthy volume of digital images using the remaining powerful features found in the database as well as PL/SQL.
The second major issue is that Oracle XE doesn't come with Java in the database and all the Oracle Multimedia methods are written in Java. This means there is no image processing, metadata extractions, watermarking...
