Greetings,

I've been working at a new site recently, and was told they were running 'Standard Edition'. Even when I noticed that the SQLPlus banner and v$version were stating 'Enterprise Edition' for some server DBs, I was still told that it was a 'quirk' on that OS, and it WAS still actually running SE.

I wasn't convinced, and I've finally gotten around to doing a bit more digging. E.g. Trying out various things that should/shouldn't be possible across SE and EE.

So, I've tried out index coalescing and building bitmap indexes on the DBs that state they are EE, and that all works. Done the similar activities on the ones that don't say they are EE and "Surprise, surprise!", ORA-439, feature not enabled!!!

I've only worked on EE DBs before, so this is all new to me, but I'm presuming that there is no way to actually 'enable' these functions within SE editions... (?)

What's also worrying me now is the DR failover for the main database.

Select from V$VERSION at the primary suggests that it is running EE, but the same at the standby site suggests it is SE.

How can the primary be propagating redo to a site that looks like it is running a lesser version of Oracle. Or am I not seeing something properly here....

If the primary has bitmap indexes, but the server version at the standby site shouldn't have that enabled... how is it managing to apply redo to the bitmap indexes?

If it IS somehow managing to apply this kind of redo... what exactly will happen when someone tries to ACTIVATE the standby database, when it has bitmap indexes and probably shouldn't??

Anyone got any easy enlightenment on any of this for me?

Best regards,

- Tony.