Do any versions of Oracle have a user limit?

Question

I'm not sure which version of Oracle we have at Work (Enterprise or Standard), but do either of them have a limit on how many user accounts you can create?

Answer 1

No version of Oracle has a (practical) limit on the number of accounts you can create (they probably have a limit at some point-- I wouldn't want to try to create more than 2^32 users for example).

Depending on how you have licensed the database, there may be limits on the number of humans and non-human processes that can access the database. Assuming that you are creating one Oracle account per human user, that would imply that creating too many would cause you to breach your licensing agreement. Oracle won't prevent you from doing this, it's up to the DBA to ensure that the system is licensed properly.

Note as well that you gain no advantage if you have a single Oracle user account with a large number of humans using that account to log in (either directly or via an application). If you are licensing by user, you still have to account for all the humans on the other end of all the applications.

Answer 2

Both Enterprise or Standard Edition do not have have a technical limitation, but a legal problem if you use features without license or exceed the user/processor limit.