Re: Incomplete recovery question

Maureen,

Based on your posts, I assume you are working on a copy of the database separate from production. All of my advice is predicated on that assumption.

If the data in which you are interested is in the datafiles from 8/17, the you are stuck querying that data from 8/17 or after, unless you can find a prior backup of those files.

If the data you need is not in the 8/17 files, and those files are not from the current UNDO or SYSTEM tablespaces, and do not contain any rollback segments, you can get rid of them. Either offline drop them, or performing a create controlfile without them. Then as long as you recover past the time of the latest datafile, just open read only at intervals (alter database open read only;). Opening a database this way does not invalidate the recovery.

There is also a parameter "_allow_read_only_corruption" (and others that can help in a tricky recovery), but based on your description of the problem, I do not believe you need them.

Hopefully you realize you have the option to restore just SYSTEM, UNDO/rollbacks, and the few datafiles containing the changed data. You can re-create the controlfile from script with just those few files and open read_only at intervals as I outlined. You do not need to involve all the other files from the database.

Regards,

Jeremiah Wilton
ORA-600 Consulting
http://www.ora-600.net

Maureen English wrote:
> We're on release 92080, HP Tru64 Unix. That's exactly what I'd like to
> do! We're currently just making guesses as to when the change could have
> occurred and it's getting a little old copying those datafiles back and
> reapplying more archive logs each time!

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