Thank you for all your suggestions. I put together a team of IT and QA people to discuss options and we met yesterday. We have decided to go with a logical standby since it seems to meet most of our needs. The documentation has already given me the information I need to start working towards the standby scenario. We have the opportunity to rebuild from the ground up the server that will host the standby. Our intent is to make it look like production as far as memroy, disk, OS and Oracle versions, which none of our other servers do now. I have the luxury of time for testing the standby on a small test database dedicated to my uses. Sandy