Using only archivelogs for recovery?

[Zahier]

Currently working my way thru a disaster. Scenario is as follows:

Lost all datafiles due to SAN crash. All backups are also lost due to 3rd-party backup-product catalog corruption, faulty and overwritten media. The only files I have available are system, temp, undo and user, all restored from what could be recovered from a full backup. However the APPLICATION tablespace containing my data is GONE. I do however have all archivelogs on disk from the day the tablespace was created.

I have exhausted all options with Oracle Support via iTar.
I have given up on 3rd party vendor.

My last option is to try and apply the archivelogs to the/a database for this APPLICATION tablespace. Even if I force inconsistencies, I need to extract whatever I can.

Logic tells me the archivelogs contains ALL changes that were applied to my APPLICATION datafiles.

Now I found a parameter to force open the database. But how do I force-apply archive logs without a full backup to start recovery from? Anyone have experience with such an odd scenario.

 

[dbtoo2001]

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/backup.102/b14191/recoscen003.htm#BRADV224

I've never tried it. Let us know how you make out, and what the steps were that you did. Thanks.

Good luck.

 

[Zahier]

Thank you dbtoo2001. I have also found this link.

http://www.dbspecialists.com/presentations/missing_logs.html

It's going to be a long week. Will update at the end of the exercise.

 

[Zahier]

It's been a long month. I have yet to try this scenario.

I have in the meantime found that the client has made a copy (via cold backup) of this database, which means it is identical in structure to the database they lost. Unfortunately they have OPEN NORESETLOGS this copy database and have been processing in this database for months now. So I can't apply the archivelogs to this database......no backup of the copy was kept.

What I am getting at is, because the databases are identical in structure I can use Logminer to read the archivelogs of the database I lost. It seems to be working as I can read the data in some of the tables.....quite cool!

I have this question though. Hope someone could help. One of the columns that I require is a BLOB and Logminer does populate it, but as a HEX value. I need to find all rows that have a TIFF image in this blob. Is there a constant HEX value in the header, for a TIFF image, that I can base my search criteria on?
Example:
Select from v$logmnr_contents where tiff_image_field like "%AB1234DE%";

 

[hoinz]

As for identifying TIFFs:
A Google search for "magic number" and "TIFF" should give you a start.

What you are trying to do looks like a lot of labour though.
Hope this helps