I'm looking for answers to this question, but so far haven't turned up a usable answer. Perhaps I'm asking it the wrong way.
I want to replay the xlogs from the beginning of time up until a particular time. The problem is, the time is before the first base backup. But I have all the xlogs since the database was initialized.
To test this, I initialized a new DB and put a few xlogs in its pg_xlog directory, and I create a simple recovery.conf ("restore_command=false"). When I start it up, I get something like "DETAIL: WAL file database system identifier is 6221786353392811102, pg_control database system identifier is 6252279422905597461."
The most important question is: How do I recover to PIT, starting from initialization, without a base backup, provided I have all xlog files.
The secondary question is: How can I test this with a new instance?