Tips to Recover a Dropped Oracle Table

Oracle Database Tips by Donald BurlesonFebruary 24, 2015, Updated May 21, 2015

Question: How do I recover a dropped Oracle table? I emptied the recycle bin and I need the table back or I will lose my job. How do I recover a dropped table? Can I restore the table and recover the dropped table without affecting other objects of the database?

Answer: DBAs get fired for dropping production tables, so act quickly! DDL like drop table cannot be rolled-back, and you have lost your recycle bin, but you still have several options for recovering a dropped table:

Data pump exports - If you care about the data in this table, you would have exported it nightly.
RMAN - You can recover a single dropped table by restoring the entire database into your test environment using RMAN, and then roll forward. You can then extract the table and copy it from test to production using CTAS over a database link and then re-add the indexes and constraints.
LogMiner - Oracle LogMiner can used to recover a dropped table. See here, the steps to recover a dropped table using LogMiner.
Flashback - It's easy to recover a dropped table with these steps in flashback.

Here is an example of recovering a dropped table with flashback. To recover the table we first check to see that it resides in the recyclebin, and then we issue the "flashback table to before drop" command to recover the table:

SQL> drop table mytab;

Table dropped.

SQL> select original_name from dba_recyclebin;

ORIGINAL_NAME
--------------------------------
MYTAB

SQL> flashback table MYTAB to before drop;

Flashback complete.

SQL> select * from mytab;

ID
----------
2
2

Sometimes you just drop a column rather than the whole table. Follow the link for insight into how to recover a dropped column.

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