Uncommitting committed sins

I overheard one of my team requesting a DBA to restore a table from backup following an overzealous data deletion incident. I thought the chances of him getting them to take on a single table restore on that database was slim given their current workload and the fact that that the table in question was only used to hold a history of data load batch execution times; it contained no vital information

So I suggested that my developer tried a flashback query to put things to right. A what?

I asked the developer at what time he had his mishap, it was only an hour ago so I suggested that he select the contents of the table as of 2 hours ago into a new table and then fix up his problem when he was confident that we got the right stuff back. A simple:

SELECT * from my_table as of timestamp sysdate - 2/24;

Result one happy developer who has now a new string to his bow.