rcrfb wrote:

> there's another advantage of transaction logs (sometimes also called
> 'redo logs'): the possibility of recovering a database to a time
> between the last (full) backup and 'now'.
>
> Given the last (or some previous) backups and a continuous list of
> transaction logs (most databases will write more than one redo log
> file instead of writing into one single file), it should be possible
> to install the database from the backup and make the recovery process
> reading all needed redo logs until a given timestamp has reached.
>
> This will make it possible not to only recover from system crashes,
> but it is (partly) possible to recover from "damagign SQL statements
> (like 'dropping tables' or other such stuff). Such things cannot be
> handled by shadow databases (as the table will be dropped there too:-).

But since we are professionals, we would have disabled those actions on
the production database, and would be working to produce an upgrade on
backup of the live data ;)
With a view to pumping live data into the new database once all the
off-line testing had been completed.

--
Lester Caine
-----------------------------
L.S.Caine Electronic Services