Oracle Flashback Technology

Oracle Flashback Technology
Oracle Flashback Technology reduces recovery time from hours to minutes.
from: http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/availability/htdocs/Flashback_Overview.htm
According to many studies, 40% of application outages are caused by operator or user errors. Part of being human is making mistakes. But these errors are extremely difficult to avoid and can be particularly difficult to recover from without advance planning and the right technology. Such errors can result in "logical" data corruption, or cause downtime of one or more components of the IT infrastructure. While it is relatively simple to rectify the failure of an individual component, detection and repair of logical data corruption, such as accidental deletion of valuable data, is a time consuming operation that causes enormous loss of business productivity. Typical user-errors may include accidental deletion of valuable data, deleting the wrong data, and dropping the wrong table.
Guarding Against Human Errors
The Oracle Database architecture leverages the unique technological advances in the area of database recovery due to human errors. Oracle Flashback Technology provides a set of new features to view and rewind data back and forth in time. The Flashback features offer the capability to query historical data, perform change analysis, and perform self-service repair to recover from logical corruptions while the database is online. With Oracle Flashback Technology, you can indeed undo the past!
Oracle9i introduced Flashback Query to provide a simple, powerful and completely non-disruptive mechanism for recovering from human errors. It allows users to view the state of data at a point in time in the past without requiring any structural changes to the database.
Oracle Database 10g extended the Flashback Technology to provide fast and easy recovery at the database, table, row, and transaction level. Flashback Technology revolutionizes recovery by operating just on the ch