Restoring an Oracle Instance from a Previous Point-in-Time

There are occasions when access to a production Oracle instance from a previous point-in-time is required for temporary use. For example, development teams may need to run tests on production data. Similarly, you may want to check the contents for compliance purposes. In these circumstances, the usage is temporary and you do not want to restore an entire database, which requires large amounts of storage.

The most appropriate solution is to perform a clone restore on an alternate node. The Oracle instance will be up in minutes regardless of the original database size. Note that the only space used in this process is for the data that gets modified during the existence of the instance. Data transfer does not occur during the clone process. Once the usage is done, the instance can quickly be torn down by unmapping the volumes from the Catalogic DPX Restore window. On a Windows machine, you must delete the instance first, through oradim -del -sid <sidname>.