What is DATA PUMP?

What is data pump in Oracle?

Oracle Data Pump is a newer, faster and more flexible alternative to the "exp" and "imp" utilities used in previous Oracle versions. In addition to basic import and export functionality data pump provides a PL/SQL API and support for external tables.

Oracle Data Pump is a new and unique feature of Oracle Database. A new public interface package, DBMS_DATAPUMP, provides a server-side infrastructure for fast data and metadata movement between Oracle databases. It is ideal for large databases and data warehousing environments, where high-performance data movement offers significant time savings to database administrators.

Data Pump automatically manages multiple, parallel streams of unload and load for maximum throughput. The degree of parallelism can be adjusted on-the-fly. There are new and easy-to-use Export and Import utilities (expdp and impdp), as well as a web-based Enterprise Manager export/import interface.

Key Features:

·         Fast Performance: Operations performed with the new Data Pump Export and Import utilities are typically much faster than operations performed with the original Export and Import utilities. With Data Pump Export, when the direct path method of unloading is used, a single stream of data unload is about two times faster than original Export. With Data Pump Import, a single stream of data load is about 15-45 times faster than original Import.

·         Improved Management Restart: Every Data Pump operation has a master table that is created in the schema of the user running a Data Pump job. The master table maintains information about all aspects of the job, such as the current state of every object exported or imported and its location in the dump file set.

·         Fine-Grained Object Selection: A Data Pump job can exclude or include virtually any type of object and any subset of objects within a type. The following client parameters are used:

1.       The EXCLUDE parameter filters the metadata that is exported and imported by specifying objects and object types to be excluded from the current operation. An optional name qualifier can be used for finer selectivity within each object type specified.

2.       The INCLUDE parameter filters the metadata that is exported and imported by specifying objects and object types to be included for the current operation. An optional name qualifier can be used for finer selectivity within each object type specified.

3.       The CONTENT parameter specifies what is exported or imported: metadata only, data only, or both.

4.       The QUERY parameter filters data by specifying a clause for a SQL SELECT statement, which is applied to all tables in the export job or to a specific table.