gsprince,

I reviewed numerous Metalink articles and Oracle documentation to research this thread. I could not find anything that indicated directly that NOARCHIVELOG is not available when operating a standby DB. I would think that it would have been in the Metalink articles, because they did specifically mention that the Primary database must be in ARCHIVELOG mode (obviously). However, those same articles also stated that it was imperative to make the primary and standby as close to identical as possible, and they said to copy the primary init.ora for use on the standby, and then specified exactly which parameters to change for proper standby functionality. None of the parameters to be changed involved setting ARCHIVELOG mode.

So, barring any further discoveries (I'll look around some more), I cannot substantiate my earlier post that ARCHIVELOG mode is mandatory. Since I'm aware that under "normal" circumstances, redo logs cannot be applied except to a database in ARCHIVELOG mode, it makes sense to me that the same restriction would apply here. However, I can also see that someone may wish to use the standby for reporting, analysis or some other read-only mode rather than production. Thus ARCHIVELOG mode might not even be relevant or useful to their operation and it would make sense to allow the DBA to decide the appropriate mode of operation of the standby DB.

Anyone have a definitive answer?