The ability to be able to import and export either individual integrations, connections, lookups, or groups of integrations (known as packages), provides us with the means to achieve a number of different things; the most common of those being the following:
Keeping integrations and related objects under configuration management
Separation of the development of integrations from production environments
Exploiting prebuilt integrations from vendors other than Oracle
Synchronizing configuration of lookups across many environments
Distributing integrations into different environments, or making them available for others to use
In addition to importing and exporting whole integrations, you will have noticed through our journey in this book that parts can be discretely imported and exported separately. For the purposes of this chapter, we are only going to concentrate on the larger import and export activities, but the motivations for performing a focused operation are often the same...