You *can* build a physical standby database with SE, and this is almost certainly what you want for disaster recovery.

The only catch is that you cannot use DATA GUARD to maintain the physical standby -- it is not available with Standard Edition. Happily, all you really need is a couple shell scripts to transfer archived redo logs, and apply them at the DR site.

The only catch here, is that with this technique, you *will* lose some data when you failover to the DR site, because the standby database can on be as current as the last *archived* redo log. You can probably fix this, though, by using some sort of block-level replication to synchronously maintain the online redologs at the DR site. It will probably be expensive, and has the potential to slow down the primary database -- perhaps significantly -- so do this only if you really need to.

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Oracle® Database Licensing Information 11g Release 1 (11.1)

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B28359_01/license.111/b28287/editions.htm#sthref33

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