oracle archive log destinations

been recently having a problem with oracle when the disk was getting full with archivelogs and oracle just stopped responding until the logwriter could save the log and the redo log could be switched. So I thought I should add an alternate location, which would be used if the primary one becomes invalid.

So I read the manual and did like it says:

firstly:

The first method is to use the LOG_ARCHIVE_DEST_n parameter (where n is an integer from 1 to 10) to specify from one to ten different destinations for archival. Each numerically-suffixed parameter uniquely identifies an individual destination.

secondly:

The LOG_ARCHIVE_DEST_STATE_n (where n is an integer from 1 to 10) initialization parameter allows you to control the availability state of the specified destination (n). The destination state can have three values: ENABLE,DEFER, or ALTERNATE. The value ENABLE indicates that Oracle can use the destination, whereas DEFER indicates that the location is temporarily disabled. The third value, ALTERNATE, means that the destination is an alternate. It's availability state is DEFER, unless there is a failure of its parent destination, in which case its state becomes ENABLE.

So after I added parameters to my init.ora file accordingly, the database wouldn't start!

Alert log didn't contain any errors, it would simply end with this line:

Using log_archive_dest parameter default value

But if to try starting the database from sqlplus with startup nomount, it would give this error:

ORA-00439: feature not enabled: Managed Standby

So it comes out that the Managed Standby is a feature of Enterprise Edition ONLY! And LOG_ARCHIVE_DEST_n depends on that feature and therefore cannot be used with Standard Edition.
So I have do with LOG_ARCHIVE_DEST parameter and just make the disk larger... Can't think of any other good solution now...

Administrator's guide doesn't say a word about this. It has a link although to the 9i Reference, which has a note of this dependency trick..

This parameter is valid only if you have installed Oracle Enterprise
Edition. You may continue to use LOG_ARCHIVE_DEST if you have installed Oracle
Enterprise Edition. However, you cannot use both LOG_ARCHIVE_DEST_n and
LOG_ARCHIVE_DEST, as they are not compatible.