You know, I'm feeling like an idiot now. Cause I forgot about this.

Just got done talking to my buddy at the old client site and he's like "if you're running 9i and you want to have a database that continually updated by prod just make a lodgical standby and let your users play on that".

He's right you have two standbys. A physical one ready to go incase prod $hits and a lodgical one for test/dev.