Chapter 1. Data Pump

Storage technology is improving day by day, and the more storage that becomes available at a low cost, the more data appears to fill it up. Managing high volumes of data becomes impractical if we take the traditional export/import approach, as this tool is very limited. Let's remember that export/import has been available in Oracle for a very long time, it dates back to Oracle Release 5, and it has been adapted to incorporate some meaningful new features. When 10g first appeared, a complete re-engineering took place and a new product was conceived to meet today's data management requirements. It was the Data Pump.

Data Pump allows better manageability, and performance; it can be parameterized to meet particular data management requirements, such as direct export/import operations between different databases (or even different versions, starting with 10g Release 1). It can remap data object definitions, and access them by means of either a Command Line Interface(CLI) batch or interactive interface. In turn, the data pump Application Programming Interface(API) allows a programmer to embed data pump code inside a regular PL/SQL application so that it manages its own data without requiring a direct Database Administrator (DBA) or Database Owner(DBO) intervention.