Beginning Oracle Database 11g Administration From Novice to Professional

CHAPTER 8 USER MANAGEMENT AND DATA LOADING 169
The Export and Import Utilities
The and utilities—used for exporting data out of and importing data into a database,
respectively—were once the workhorses of the Oracle world. The data pump
utilities, which were introduced in Oracle Database 10g, have more features but also have
the drawback of using PL/SQL routines for reading and writing and, as a result, can only
read and create server- side files. On the other hand, the and utilities read and create
client- side files such as those located on a user’s laptop. The use of named pipes to
transfer data from one database to another database without creating an intermediate
file is not possible with the data pump utilities. 1 Also, the data pump utilities do not work
with magnetic tapes and standby databases. As a result of limitations like these, the
and utilities have not been fully supplanted by the new utilities. I discuss them here
for completeness even though their use is now expressly discouraged by Oracle. 2
The and utilities are rich in features; you can list them with the clause.
Listing 8-13 shows the features of the utility—the utility has very similar features.
Listing 8-13. Features of the Utility
1. Metalink notes 30528.1 and 1018477.6 discuss the use of named pipes with the and utilities.
2. The following language appears in Oracle Database 11g Utilities: “Original export is desupported for
general use as of Oracle Database 11g. The only supported use of Original Export in 11g is backward
migration of XMLType data to a database version 10g release 2 (10.2) or earlier. Therefore, Oracle
recommends that you use the new Data Pump Export and Import utilities, except in the following situations
which require Original Export and Import:
You want to import files that were created using the original Export utility (exp).
You want to export files that will be imported using the original Import utility (imp). An example
of this would be if you wanted to export data from Oracle Database 10g and then import it into an
earlier database release.”