11g Restore points

Normal vs Guaranteed restore points:

Guaranteed Restore Points
Like a normal restore point, a guaranteed restore point serves as an alias for an SCN
in recovery operations. A principal difference is that guaranteed restore points never
age out of the control file and must be explicitly dropped. In general, you can use a
guaranteed restore point as an alias for an SCN with any command that works with a
normal restore point.

If the recovery area has enough disk space to store the needed logs, then you can use a
guaranteed restore point to rewind a whole database to a known good state days or
weeks ago. As with Flashback Database, even the effects of NOLOGGING operations
like direct load inserts can be reversed with guaranteed restore points.

Limitations that apply to Flashback Database also apply to
guaranteed restore points


To create a restore point:
1. Connect SQL*Plus to a target database.
2. Ensure that the database is open or mounted. If the database is mounted, then it
must have been shut down cleanly (unless it is a physical standby database).
3. Run the CREATE RESTORE POINT statement.
The following example shows how to create a normal restore point in SQL*Plus:
SQL> CREATE RESTORE POINT before_upgrade;
This example shows how to create a guaranteed restore point:
SQL> CREATE RESTORE POINT before_upgrade GUARANTEE FLASHBACK DATABASE;