Data Pump Export and Import
Data Pump takes the old export and import utilities one step further, you can have total control over the job running (stop it, pause it, check it, restart it). Data pump is a server side technology and it can transfer large amounts of data very quickly using parallel streams to achieve maximum throughput, they can be 15-45% faster than the older import/export utilities.
Advantages using data pump are
- ability to estimate jobs times
- ability to restart failed jobs
- perform fine-grained object selection
- monitor running jobs
- directly load a database from a remote instance via the network
- remapping capabilities
- improved performance using parallel executions
A couple of notes is that you cannot export to a tape device only to disk, and the import will only work with version of oracle 10.1 or greater. Also remember that the expdp and impdp are command line tools and run from within the Operating System.
Data Pump Uses
You can use data pump for the following
- migrating databases
- copying databases
- transferring oracle databases between different operating systems
- backing up important tables before you change them
- moving database objects from one tablespace to another
- transporting tablespace’s between databases
- reorganizing fragmented table data
- extracting the DDL for tables and other objects such as stored procedures and packages
Data Pump components
Data pump technology consists of three major components
- dbms_datapump – the main engine for driving data dictionary metadata loading and unloading
- dbms_metadata – used to extract the appropriate metadata
- command-line – expdp and impdp are the import/export equivalents
Examples:
Export
expdp scott/tiger DIRECTORY=dmpdir DUMPFILE=scott.dmp
Import
impdp system/oracle DIRECTORY=dmpdir DUMPFILE=scott.dmp