To create an Autonomous Database for Developers, you must have access to Oracle Exadata Database Service or Autonomous Database on either a Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure or Exadata Cloud@Customer. In other words, only those customers with active subscriptions to any of the following service platforms can create developer databases:

• Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure
• Oracle Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure
• Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer
• Oracle Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer

There is no limit on the number of free developer databases; it’s limited by the capacity of your Exadata infrastructure.

You can provision an Autonomous Database for Developers from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) console or using API.

To create a developer database, you need an Autonomous Container Database (ACD) without an Autonomous Data Guard in an ECPU-based Autonomous Exadata VM Cluster (AVMC).

If you do not have these resources provisioned already, create the ECPU-based AVMC first and then create an ACD without disaster recovery (Autonomous Data Guard) using that AVMC.

After creating or identifying (if they already exist) the AVMC and ACD, you can create an Autonomous Database for Developers using them. Provisioning a developer database using the OCI console follows the same workflow as creating a regular Autonomous Database, as described in Create an Autonomous Database. Once created, the Autonomous Database for Developers instances appear with a Developer label in the list of Autonomous Databases on the OCI console.

Each developer database comes with the following specifications:

• Compute: Fixed 4 ECPUs, with no CPU scaling
• Storage: Fixed 32 GB ( ~ 20 GB of DATA)
• Session limits: 30 concurrent database sessions
• Workload type: Autonomous Data Warehouse, Autonomous Transaction Processing

Autonomous Database for Developers supports all the features offered by a regular Autonomous Database except those listed below. These limitations are in place to ensure that the developer databases are optimally used as a development sandbox.

Developer database instances:

• Do not support Autonomous Data Guard. Hence, they can only be provisioned in an ACD without Autonomous Data Guard.
• Support ECPU only. Therefore, you can provision them only on an ECPU based ACD.

• Come with fixed compute and storage sizing, do not support manual or auto-scaling and storage scaling.

• Can not have long-term backups.
• Do not provide Database In-memory.

• Cloning: The Autonomous Database for Developers offers fewer resources and features than the regular Autonomous Database. For non-development uses, such as load/stress testing and production, or to access all features, users can clone from a developer database to a regular Autonomous Database.

  You can also clone a regular database into a developer database. However, to successfully clone a regular database into a developer database, the actual used space of the source database, rounded up to the next GB, must be 32GB or less.

  See Clone an Autonomous Database for instructions.

• Backup and Recovery: You can enable automatic backups or trigger manual backups of your developer database as needed. If the backup destination is an Object Storage and Recovery Service, the backups will be billed.
• Service Maintenance: Developer databases follow the same patching schedule as regular Autonomous Database; however, they will not support critical one-off patches.
• Database Application Development and Developer Tools: With Autonomous Database for Developers, you can use all the developer-related features and built-in tools that an Autonomous Database offers. See Develop Applications with Autonomous Database in Tasks and Service Monitoring in Features for complete details.

Autonomous Database for Developers comes with a service level objective (SLO) of 99.5%, and you can log service requests (SRs) to Oracle Support for assistance. However, there is no Severity 1 SR support for developer databases. See Create a Service Request in My Oracle Support to learn how to contact Oracle Support for assistance.