Originally posted by nagarjuna
ignore that PITR.. what I really wanted to say is 'we can recover only the tablespace of interest'. By doing thise we can avoid the time needed to restore the entire set up of datafiles. (...SNIP....) In my method we need to restore only system tablespace (one 500mb datafile) and user_data tablespace (six 5GB datafiles) and do the recovery.. this saves lot of time..Say 6 Hrs.. hope, you got my point..
Yeah, I got your point, but I think you are missing the main point alltogether ! We are talking the same thing: restore only the needed tablespaces (SYSTEM, USER) from cold backup - that is all he needs. We agree on that, that is also the scenario the original poster was asking about,and we all confirmed that this scenario is OK. But why would you then perform any recovery???? No need for that, WHY ANY RECOVERY AT ALL???? The database was closed nicely before the cold backup was taken, so all the datafiles and controlfile are consistent!

All he has to do is to mount the database, drop the datafiles that were not restored (RBS, TEMP, ....), rename restored datafiles/redologs (if the paths in controlfile do not corespond to present locations) and open the database to export that table.

No need for any recovery, no need for any controlfile to trace and such ...

P.S.
I indeed made a typo (a mistake, if you want) in my previous posts, stating that "he will have to drop few tablespaces" - it should be "drop few DATAFILES". Maybe this caused some confusion - if so, it was my bad.

P.P.S.
And of course, when I say DROP/RENAME in the context of this discussion, it is ment as SQL command that will update the controlfile, not the physical delete/rename on filesystem.