I want to thank all who have replied (so far) & am still hoping to find a solution. I know for a fact that during the dbca wizard, one pane has a a pull down selector. The default value is/was Enterprise Edition & the pulldown allowed to select Standard Edition. The following is how I differentiate between the two. From the instance that I created yesterday when invoking SQL*PLUS I see: Connected to: Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production With the Partitioning, OLAP and Data Mining options ============================================================ From the instance that was created by dbca & selecting Standard Edition I see: Connected to: Oracle Database 10g Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production ======================================= without the additional Enterprise options listed! FWIW - select * from v$version; returns identical information from both 10gR2 instances.