I am in an enterprise environment where we have applications that need to run against multiple Oracle databases. Developers may need to manage multiple vintages of these databases to support different test data or diagnose bugs against different versions of the code.

Right now, we have a limited set of test environments set up on "real" Oracle servers within the data center. We juggle these among development and QA groups and there is a lot of conflicts and inefficiencies that arise because of it.

I am taking a look at Oracle Express Edition which would allow me to spin up a local Oracle database. This is similar to the workflow I most often see with SQL Server. Devs work on their location machine until they are ready to integration and then they push their DB changes to integration / QA environments.

However, from what I read it seems that Oracle XE only supports one database instance at a time. So if I have an application that utilizes two different databases, I can't have both of them running on my local machine. Is that correct?

Does Oracle Standard or Personal editions get around this limitation? If I had one of those installed locally, how difficult would it be to get multiple databases working on the same development machine? How do dev shops handle developing against Oracle where they need to be using several different Oracle instances for their applications?