Re: Point in time recovery

Vic Goldberg <vg19@cornell.edu> wrote: :Folks -- : : We're running 7.22 on AIX 4.1.5. We use onbar for backups, :talking to IBM's ADSM storage manager. : : We've got a development system where several different groups :of users each have their own databases. We recently had an instance :where one of the groups completely scrogged their database via :entering a really, really bad series of SQL commands. As far as :we've been told by support, we're out of luck in terms of using :our backups to recover just the single database (which has its own :dbspaces), as onbar point in time recovery only works on a :entire instance, not on particular dbspaces. : : Any suggestions? Is there anyone who has got a good work-around? :We're considering nightly dbexports, but with a lot of databases, :that's pretty time intensive. Unless you have a very large development installation (many disks) I would consider buying enough disks to do a restore to different devices. Than you could do a complete restore to the point in time where the database in question was trashed. You would then dbexport this database, go back to the original setup and dbimport it. With cheap 4 or 9 GB disks this may be affordable. At first sight it's amazing that even onbar can't do backup/restore at the database level. I do however assume that onbar reads from the physical disks. In that case a restore of a single database to a dbspace that contain more than one database would easily be impossible. The space to restore may have been used by another database (after something like a drop of a table and that space beeing reused by another database). A restore of dbspaces that contained only one database and therby of one such database should however be no problem. It should also not be to hard for Informix to write a special restore utility that understands the logical data on the tape and does something like a dbimport from it, but with the option of point in time restore from the log records for the database in question. There may be other technical solutions that are better, but the facility is badly needed. This kind of facility where high up on the IIUG wish list this summer. Then in the form of table level restore, but to me this is essentially the same problem. I do realy hope they come up with a solution. This is a problem in production databases as well as in your development case. May be someone from Informix could comment on this? Nils.Myklebust@idg.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org