I agree that one good book is a good thing to have; my personal preference in
the "battle of the RDBMS" is clearly PostgreSQL, popularity aside ;}
I'm not sure whether you've stumbled across these pages in your quest for
information:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/curre...up-online.html
and
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/curre...iguration.html
They discuss WAL archiving (which is similar to Oracles archive-log
mechanism - in the functionality, anyway). Basically what you do is
to start with a, for example, week-old snapshot for the restore, and
then just add the (always current) WAL chunks back to it on restore.
After all, on a heavily loaded production database system you can't
run an export every 30 minutes. ;}
Cheers,
Tink