Recovery from Backups

The traditional recovery option, when online recovery fails, is to restore the database from dumps, and incrementally apply transaction logs to bring the restored database back to the most current possible state. This is the best solution for restoring to an absolutely consistent state after corruption. It often brings the database to a state of consistency to within seconds of the point of original failure.

However, the drawback with this traditional approach is that the recovery granularity is at the level of the transaction dump. If a transaction causing corruption is dumped, the traditional method means loading a database dump and applying transaction log dumps up to, but not including, the transaction dump containing the offending transaction. This can result in hours of lost transactions.