Very selective backup

Question

Hi,
I manage a centralised 10gR2 (standard edition) datawarehouse containing the data of about 168 hospitals. I am not using any specific Oracle datawarehouse product. Everything is PL/SQL coded using object features. Data is refreshed every night. The DW contains about 30 tables. Of course each hospital has a specific ID identifying its data inside each table. All the data is stored in one tablespace (TBS_DATA) and indexes in another (TBS_INDEX). The need for selective backups has suddenly arisen following some new development request. The need is as follows : I have to be able to call a backup for a specific hospital at any time. (which means only backuping specific records in each table) and restoring that backup quickly if necessary. Can this be done without having to insert the specific lines into new tables??? and deleting-inserting back into the original table when restoring is necessary???
Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
JC

Answer 1

If you could upgrade to an enterprise edition database with partitioning, you could partition the tables by hospital ID, put everything related to a given hospital into a single tablespace, and do backups and restores on individual tablespaces. Probably a bit pricy Oracle license-wise, though.
Making reasonable assumptions about how far back a hospital might need to restore and that there are easily-identified points in time that represent points you'd like to restore to, I would look into Oracle's Workspace Manager functionality. Without seeing more about the system design you have (how data is loaded and accessed, for example), it's hard to suggest a good strategy, but I'd wager that you could create a strategy for creating, maintaining, and deleting workspaces that would allow you to do this sort of thing relatively seamlessly.
Another option might be to add a LOAD_DATE column to every table, have a table that stores the current LOAD_DATE for every CLIENT_ID, and replace your existing tables with views that join the actual table to the table of client LOAD_DATE's. Rolling back would just require changing the LOAD_DATE for the client.
Justin