Re: Point in time recovery

I am not sure if what the support tell you is correct. If you do 'onbar --', it allows you to backup and restore dbspaces as an entity itself. I have tried that myself, and it worked. Maybe you can set up an instance with about 3 dbspaces, and experiment with it. Nils Myklebust (Nils.Myklebust@idg.no) wrote: : 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 --