Working with one or more databases during development cycles will invariably mean that developers need to replicate schemas between different databases, such as test and production, or they need to test data based on a subset of instance data. To do this, developers need to produce easily replicable scripts that copy and move data from one database instance to another, or from one schema to another.
"Data" means many things to people. Here, data is both the instance data (rows in a table) and metadata (object definitions, such as tables, stored in the Data Dictionary). In this chapter we look at the variety of options offered in SQL Developer, specifically, exporting instance data and metadata, and importing instance data. You will see the different options available when copying instance and metadata from one schema to another and when comparing metadata between two schemas. We'll look at how to create and then use the scripts produced...