Oracle license for development environment?

Question

I'm sorry that I have to ask that here, but I haven't found a conclusive answer on the oracle page or in the internet. I've even been on the phone with a sales rep, but they couldn't help me neither.

What kind of Oracle Setups/licenses are you using for your development environments? We currently are using 10g XE which only has one significant limitation: the 4gb database size limit. Are there any other 'free' versions which don't have such limitations? And if not, what would be the most economic version/combination? The often have a hard user limit which are ridiculous low.

Thanks! Cheers Reto

PS. I'm not sure if I have to mention that: I'm not looking for any illegal solutions

Answer 1

Since it appears that there exists a production environment, the license for the software you download from OTN will almost certainly not be sufficient. Since it sounds like each developer has a local development environment, however, you should be able to make use of the Personal Edition. This is a relatively inexpensive ($460 perpetual/ $92 for a 1-year license plus support in the Oracle Store at the moment) version of Oracle that is intended to be used by a single developer on a local machine. It has all the functionality of the enterprise edition of the database.