Database recovery/Rollforward

Greetings all;

A question for the DBA's:

We're just starting to test backup/recovery strategies (no live applications yet), and have immediately come up with several questions, and here they are:

The Oracle docs/training material et al address the issue of recovery where you restore *only* a damaged data file (for instance), and them perform complete recovery. Or, restore the damaged file, and perform incomplete recovery. This is fine, but take the scenario where your data center blows up, and you take your offsite database backup, and your offsite backup of every archived log file created since the backup to some new box somewhere. This is where we're a little confused. You restore *every* file that makes up the database, which puts you at the point in time of your last backup, and everything is in synch, and recovery is not necessary as far as the database is concerned. But, you (we) want to rollforward by applying every log file since the backup. The question is, how do you do it? Again, all the docs seem to address the issue where the database knows that he is out of synch, not the scenario where you have a bunch of archive logs you want to apply.

I would greatly appreciate any help, discussion, shoves in the right direction, references to documentation etc.

Thanks

David J. DeWolfe
Data Base Specialist
Office of Information Services (formerly UACN) University of Alaska
Fairbanks, Alaska 99775
<sxdjd_at_orca.alaska.edu>

"In a vicious struggle for survival, intelligence  emerges as the weapon of choice" NOVA - In search of human origins                                                                           Received on Fri Mar 17 1995 - 15:27:41 CET