Rollback insert statement

Question

I have inserted some records in one of my table which are upto 5000.

But now i realize that these records should not be inserted in this table. I can't delete the records one by one. Or can't distinguish the inserted records for the previous records in the table.

How can i rollback this insert statement, so that my table return to its original form.

(I red that these is a way using log. But i don't know erectly how to do it.)

Thanks.

Answer 1

Assuming you were not inside a transaction when you did this, you're going to find the process painful. Not sure what flavour of DBMS you're interested in, but here's some info on SQL Server 2005:

Rollback transaction using transaction log

Essentially, the easiest way to do this is to restore your DB from a backup that predates your inserts.

Answer 2

Here are couple additional ideas you can try.

Restore a full backup in another database and then compare tables using some third party tools such as ApexSQL Data Diff or dbForge or Red Gate

If database was in full recovery mode try reading transaction log. Here are several posts on this topic:

SQL Server Transaction Log Explorer/Analyzer

Read the log file (*.LDF) in sql server 2008

How to view transaction logs in sql server 2008

Answer 3

I am guessing the inserts statements have been committed to the database else you could simply do a ROLLBACK;

Do you have an audit table? If there is an audit table you would be able to identify the rows inserted during a particular datetime and then delete them...

Answer 4

Are there any features of the inserted rows that make them distinguishable from all of the others? For example is there an inserted date, or a numeric identity column? If so, just do a delete based on that criteria.

Other than that, butterchicken is right, it's probably a bit painful. But I've never rolled back using a transaction log like that before.