Implement Oracle "Flashback Database and Restore Points"

Implement same functionality as Oracle Flashback Database and Restore Points.

There regular procedure to restore data with Informix is to restore either the entire instance or some dbspaces. This procedure can be very long (5 hours+) when high data volumes are involved.

I agree that restoring the whole thing is the best way to ensure data integrity, but sometimes taking 5 hours to restore the data is just too long. probably 5 hours are taken to restore lots of "unuseful data", especially when you run a batch procedure that you know that can fail.

The idea is to set a restore point, which would be a kind of "point in time" to recover to, run the transactions/batch process or whatever, and at this time all the logical logs are kept somewhere and never deleted.

If the batch process fails, I run a restore statement saying "restore to the restore point". Instead of restoring all the dbspaces as onbar usually does, this flashback would simply run across all the logical logs kept after setting the restore point and undo those transactions, just as the engine does at start time.
If no necessity to flashback, the restore point is deleted.

The operation done in that will probably take minutes instead of hours, and would save gigantic system availability time.

Definately a great feature for staging/test or development systems. Probably not the best for production systems, although it can be handy.

Should not be that difficult to implement, because all the mecanics is already existing in Informix.

See full description on the oracle site:
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/backup.112/e10642/flashdb.htm#BRADV582