Re: Informix Online Table Recovery: How?

John Eichelberger wrote: > > 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. This is maybe a symptom of how bad the problem is and not much use to you now but in the past I've used a scheme of unloading the database a table at a time and compressing the onloads onto an optical disk which was then backed up. This was done over a weekly cycle. It meant that the missing rows could be extracted from the optical and re-loaded. If, of course, they were created and deleted in the interval between successive unloads you were still screwed. It helped a little, however. Ian