Re: Informix Online Table Recovery: How?

In article <4v8mj2$u6t@netnews.upenn.edu>, John Eichelberger <jon@pathol ogy.dental.upenn.edu> writes >Scenario: A user has accidentally removed 20 rows from a table and needs >to get them back. You are running Informix Online 7.12 with raw partitions >(not cooked files). > >Question: How? > >Informix's suggestion was: >(1) Save your whole db to a tape (I would be using level-0 onarchive). >(2) Restore an archive that had the 20 rows that were lost. >(3) Unload the 20 rows. >(4) Restore the db you just dumped to tape. > >There has to be an easier way. Basically, what I am looking for is the >ability to restore a single table, under a different name if possible. > >In Informix-SE with cooked files we would do the following: >(1) Get a dbschema of the table currently in the database (e.g., realtab). >(2) Change the name of the table (e.g., faketab) on the dbschema output file. >(3) Create the table realtab using the dbschema's sql. >(4) Restore the realtab.dat and realtab.idx file from a backup tape of the > db to a scratch directory. >(5) Rename (in a different directory) the realtab.dat and realtab.idx > to faketab.dat and faketab.idx. >(6) Move faketab.??? to the db directory and run bcheck on it. >(7) Extract the data we want from faketab and put into realtab. >(8) Drop faketab. > >So what about Online with raw partitions? > >Thanks. > >Jon Eichelberger >P.S. Please don't tell me about something in a future release of Online. Not possible since OnLine stores the data as chunks of raw disk with it's own internal structure. i.e. tables are store in a propriertary format. Informix's suggestion is correct - restore from backup to get the rows back. To decode the contents of a level-0 archive and then apply level-1's / level 2's on top would be a nightmare. That is the price you pay for greater performance/ being able to guarantee data gets written to disk. Currently there is nothing available. Hhhm sounds like an idea for a pet project!! Anyone know the format for an tbtape style archive?? Maybe I could write something to treat a level-0 archive as if it were a collection of chunks and dump a table to a file? -- David Williams