When performing an inter-platform migration operation, due to natural OS incompatibilities, the most commonly used method is a regular export/import (exp/imp or the Data Pump version). This approach happens not to be a scalable solution. The amount of data to transfer is directly proportional to the time taken to complete. Day by day databases are growing larger and the maintenance windows are becoming narrower, so a logical data transfer may leave us in a very uncomfortable situation. If the database is 10g Release 1 or higher, the DBA can take advantage of the inter-platform transportable tablespace feature. The total amount of time it takes to have the database migrated to the target platform is equal to the time it takes to prepare all tablespace metadata to be exported, plus the time it takes to copy the datafiles to the target platform, plus the time to apply the inter-platform datafile conversion, plus the time it takes to have the metadata imported...