Oracle Data Pump utility is high speed movement of data and metadata between DB. It replaces export/import utility in previous versions. Three parts of Oracle Data Pump are:
- EXPDP and IMPDP – command line utility that uses DBMS_DATAPUMP package to execute export and import operations.
- DBMS_DATAPUMP – package used to all or part of DB from one DB to another.
- DBMS_METADATA – facility to extract, manipulation, and recreation of dictionary metadata.
Data Pump utility runs as a job called the MASTER PROCESS for each data pump execution. This master process can be stopped, restarted, and monitored throughout its execution. A MASTER TABLE is used by data pump to track job while in progress and this master table is stored in the database data pump utility is operating against. The users executing the data pump command must have CREATE TABLE privilege. The Master Table will have the same name as the job that created it and cannot have the same name as an existing table or view. Data in Master table can be used to restart the job. WORKER PROCESSES executed by Master Processes to perform actual processing of the data and metadata for the data pump utility. At any given time a master process can have multiple worker processes running in parallel.
Larry Catt
OCP