OTN Appreciation Day: The Recyclebin

Tim Hall has initiated in his blog the OTN Appreciation Day, this is my contribution to this nice idea. My favorite database feature is not rocket since, not high available, it is very basic. It is the recyclebin. Since seven years I am working as teacher for Oracle architecture trainings for my company where new DBAs can learn the basics of an Oracle RDBMS. In this training, the participants have very different knowledge about a database. Some are working for years with the database and are here for a refresh, and some are newbies. But in every class there is one guy, who is wondering about the recyclebin functionality. This functionality has saved us a lot of time in the past in cases like “Dear DBA, I have dropped a table in my development environment, please….”. And there are still many developers outside which don’t know about this feature.

Sure, in 12c we can recover a table fully automated from a backup. But sometimes we don’t want to spend too much time for problems like a dropped table. And sometimes we want to keep it simple.

SQL> SELECT object_name, original_name, type, can_undrop,droptime
  2  FROM recyclebin;

OBJECT_NAME                              ORIGINAL_NAME        TYPE       CAN DROPTIME
---------------------------------------- -------------------- ---------- --- -------------------
BIN$PpUoStgLGNngU3g6qMC5Uw==$0           T1                   TABLE      YES 2016-10-11:12:15:35

 

SQL> FLASHBACK TABLE t1 TO BEFORE DROP;

Flashback complete.

I do not often participate in the OTN forums, but for the future I will try to reserve some time for this great platform. It’s worth it.

Regards, Martin