We lost some data due to a data corruption issue, and we’re trying to get our DBA to restore one of the nightly backups from a few days ago.
However, we share this database with another team. We each own a schema within the database. Our schema is super small, and theirs I guess is some massive mapping database.
They claim Oracle only allows you to restore an entire database at once (all or nothing), which they estimate will take 2-3 days provided we can even provision a server to perform the operation on. I asked them if they can restore just our schema (which is about 30MB) and they said no.
Are we being given the run-around, or is this actually a limitation of the Oracle restore tools?
Let’s presume by “the Oracle restore tools” you mean RMAN.
RMAN is a physical backup – it copies files – and not surprisingly is restricted to physical restoration. As a consequence, its supported granularities are: block, file, tablespace and database.
So while they’re wrong to say the only possible restore is the database level, alas, you are out of luck in your quest to get just your schema restored. However, perhaps your schema uses a discrete set of tablespaces from the other project?