From my reading, I can use PITR recovery to restore my database to its state just prior to a recent change (not even an hour ago). The erroneous change resulted from an UPDATE with no WHERE on a small table (<700 rows); I mention this only in case there is a simpler recovery technique I can use for such a small subset of the entire database.
The docs state that restore_command is required in recovery.conf, and that the server will check pg_xlog/ for any requested files not found in the specified archive location.
Can I use a command that points to an empty directory as the archive location to force checks to pg_xlog? Or is there some 'cleaner' way?
Also, I read in another post (about v8.1) that the WAL records are written in 16MB segments. If the WAL containing my recovery target hasn't been written yet, how can I determine when it has and is available to me?