Patent ID: 7188124

Claim:
A method for recovering a dropped table, comprising: specifying one or more table spaces prior to one or more tables being dropped from the specified one or more table spaces, wherein specifying one or more table spaces comprises setting a dropped table recovery flag for each of the one or more table spaces in response to a request; in response to receiving a request to drop a table from one of the one or more specified table spaces, storing a unique table identifier, a time stamp reflecting the time of drop, and table definition attributes for the table in a dropped table history data structure; and dropping the table; in response to receiving a request to restore the table space that includes the dropped table, recovering the table space being restored using the dropped table history data structure, wherein the restored table space pre-dates the table space from which the table was dropped; and in response to receiving a rollforward command, rolling forward the table space containing the dropped table to a time reflected in the time stamp reflecting the time of the drop by replaying a set of stored transactions up to the time reflected in the time stamp; and copying data from the dropped table in the rolled forward selected table space to a storage data structure at a file location specified by a user.