When you are unable to perform a recovery through Oracle. You can salvage data right out of data files. You can extract data out of data files directly without a running instance. Richard Ji On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 18:22:09 +0200, Edgar Chupit <chupit@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Thank you for the link and now the final question: why does somebody > needs to read block dump? All I can think of is when you have block > corruption and cannot recover using BLOCKRECOVER feature of RMAN. > Maybe people from the list can provide real cases where they needed to > read block/heap dump and their knowledge helped them? -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l