Data Pump

Data Pump was introduced in Oracle Database 10g. It replaces the older exp/imp utilities. Data Pump enables you to quickly move data and/or metadata from one environment to another. You can use Data Pump in a variety of ways:

• Point-in-time logical backups of the entire database or subsets of data
• Replicating entire databases or subsets of data for testing or development
• Quickly generating Data Definition Language (DDL) required to re-create objects

Sometimes DBAs hold on to the old exp/imp utilities because they’re familiar with the syntax and these utilities get the job done quickly. Even if those legacy utilities are easy to use, you should consider using Data Pump going forward. Data Pump contains substantial functionality over the old exp/imp utilities:

• Performance with large data sets, allowing you to efficiently export and import gigabytes of data
• Interactive command-line utility, which gives you the ability to disconnect and then later re-attach to active Data Pump jobs
• Ability to export and import large amounts of data from a remote database directly into a local database without creating a dump file
• Ability to make on-the-fly changes to schemas, tablespaces, datafiles, and storage settings from export to import
• Sophisticated filtering of objects and data
• Security controlled via database-directory objects
• Advanced features such as compression and encryption