Okuzeka
Software Engineering vocabulary · Databases and Persistence

Point-in-time recovery

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounAdvanced term

In software engineering, point-in-time recovery means: Restoring a database to its exact state at a chosen moment, such as one minute before a bad DELETE, by replaying saved change logs on top of a backup.

In Turkish: belirli bir ana geri dönme, zamana dayalı kurtarma, PITR

How it is used

Shortened to PITR. It needs a base backup plus continuous log archiving: WAL archives in PostgreSQL, binary logs in MySQL and transaction log backups in SQL Server. Cloud databases usually offer it as a setting with a retention period.

Example sentences

  1. Thanks to point-in-time recovery, we restored the database to 14:02, just before the bad script ran.

  2. Point-in-time recovery only works if log archiving was enabled beforehand.

Common collocations

  • point-in-time recovery
  • PITR window
  • recover to a point in time
  • log archiving
  • backupA copy of a database saved at a certain moment so that the data can be brought back after a failure, a mistake or an attack.
  • restoreTo bring a database back from a backup, either to fix data loss or to create a copy of it on another server.
  • transactionA group of database operations that are treated as one unit: either all of them succeed together or none of them is applied.
  • dumpA file that contains a database's structure and data written out as SQL statements or in a special export format, which can be loaded into another database.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Databases and Persistence

Practise with graded reading

Reading at the right level is the fastest way to make new words stick. Pick free English books by level: