Classics Forum

recover from a mistake... and use of data offline - RE: DBEXPORT

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David:

I've been in that exact situation. I accidentally deleted about 8 million
inactive records in a 25 million record system on one of our production
databases. I did a restore from flat files off of (timely) unloads by first
comparison and elimination offline, then table lock and insert immediately
after a scheduled maintenance backup. It cost us about six hours of
production time in an off peak time slot. Customers weren't happy to lose
the access time, but were happy to get the historical data back that was
lost.

DBEXPORT/DBIMPORT are not good backup strategies, but they ARE a good
"offline" resource for loading tables back and forth and manipulating data
outside your production database.

For your situation, and how we recover from "little mistakes" that aren't
best served by a database restore from normal backup tapes, I use an sql
inside of a shell script to unload all our tables in dirty read one table at
a time. It then ftps the one table unload to another server/computer,
deletes the saved table data, and loops through all tables. We do it this
way so as not to take our database out of production or fill up large
quantities of UNIX space that is a premium resource on our production
machines. Offline manipulation or archive to another media is done at our
convenience from the storage computers, not our production servers. We run
it immediately prior to any significant event such as a monthly data
reconciliation or major data change/update.



Rob Konikoff

-----Original Message-----
From: David Taylor [mailto:dtaylor@rpionline.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2003 9:48 AM
To: classics@iiug.org
Subject: DBEXPORT [160]


I am working on our disaster recovery plan for our database (SE 7.2) We
currently do tape backups and level 0 backups. However, previous admins
have never used dbexport. This is unfortunate for me considering it would
be nice to retrieve some data from about 18 months ago. Anyway, my question
is this: Is it possible to find out how large a dbexport will be without
actually running a dbexport? I'm concerned with disk space and I have not
been able to find any help in any of the books that we possess.

While I have your attention maybe some of you have a thought about a second
problem I have (mentioned above briefly). We have data from roughly 18
months ago on a tape backup. Since that time some changes were made to data
in one of our tables. The changes were deemed "bad" and there was an
attempt to undo the changes. This proved unsuccessful and since then we've
grappled with some errant data as well as having to input a lot of the data
by hand. Does anyone have any ideas about a way that I could grab that data
off of the tape backups and use that in a flat file to load back into the
table, taking care to load only the needed info?

Any help to either problem would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

___________________________
David Taylor
Database Specialist
Rapidparts Inc.
616.647.3108
dtaylor@rpionline.com

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