Pankaj Chandiramani's blog

Caution: This method is for Testing & Learning purposes only.

Most of the Oracle 10g databases are using ASM for storage as it's very simple to maintain the storage w.r.t. to Disks, Datafiles etc.

Flashback Recovery is a new enhancement to the 10g database for the DBA's toolkit. Effectively, it's an "Oh shit!" protection mechanism for DBAs as it reduces recovery time from hours to minutes. Ask any DBA about the main cause of application outage - other than hardware failure - and the answer will be "human error". Such errors can result in logical data corruption and can bring down the complete system. Part of being human is making mistakes. Without advance planning, these errors are extremely difficult to avoid, and can be very difficult to recover from. Typical user-errors may include the accidental deletion of valuable data, deleting the wrong data, or dropping the wrong table.