How does the WAL work? Need to recovery the database to a specific point of time

Hi All,

I’d like to recovery the database to a specific point of time. I see some WAL files in the pg_xlog directories.

I read some blogs, and some have indicated that a recovery.conf needs to be updated.  I do not see a recovery.conf file in the $PG_DATA directory ( I see pg_hba.conf and postgresql.conf). 

1.       Do I need to create a recovery.conf file? 

2.       What specific settings should I set? 

3.       How do I ensure that postgres will read the recovery.conf file? 

4.       What is the start/stop postgres command to use when working with a recovery.conf file?

I am running on Postgres 8.4.11 and RHEL 6.4.

Thanks

Mary Wang