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Recovery of old Oracle 8i cold backup into Oracle 11g R2
I've been given the task to access an old Oracle 8i database and (in some way) extract or make the accessible the data inside. I've been provided with a cold backup (i.e.) files:
- archive
- bin
- db{1,2,3,4} (these contain .dbf files: control, rbs, redolog, system, temp, tools, users)
- dbcreate
- logs
I suspect that the real databases are the ones residing in db1-db4 and the rest are just general things which were put into the same common directory for keeping them together.
Now, I've read some posts and guides how to import dumps or how to use the database-upgrade, which in 11g doesn't offer the option to use 8i databases, but all those obviously didn't help me, simply because Oracle doesn't know anything about my DBs. The fact that the complete DB is 45gig makes it even less appealing to just try stuff on a relatively small laptop.
Answer:
I don't think there are other supported methods unless to ask Oracle support to use some internal tool to extract directly data from datafiles or try to use PRM-DUL http://zcdn.parnassusdata.com/DUL5108.zip