Oracle license for development environment?

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 ha开发者_高级运维s 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

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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.

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You can download Oracle Database 11g (and most other Oracle solutions) from their website oracle.com.

All you need is to register for free, and download the application, you don't need any license if it is for personal use.