1. Administering Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service (OCI-C)
  2. Migrating Oracle Databases to Exadata Cloud Service
  3. Migration Methods
  4. Data Pump Full Transportable Export and Import

Data Pump Full Transportable Export and Import

Like transportable tablespaces, this method provides broad cross-platform migration support, limited support for source and destination databases with different character sets, and it can be used to migrate data to a later version of Oracle Database. It simplifies the process of migrating complete databases and leverages the transportable tablespace feature where possible.

Data Pump full transportable export and import is an extension of basic transportable tablespaces, which can be used to migrate the entire contents of your source database to Exadata Cloud Service.

You perform a full transportable export by specifying the parameters FULL=YES and TRANSPORTABLE=ALWAYS when you execute the Data Pump Export. When a full transportable export is performed, a mix of data movement methods are used:

  • Objects residing in transportable tablespaces have only their metadata unloaded into the dump file and the data is moved when you copy the data files to the target database.

  • Objects residing in non-transportable tablespaces (for example, SYSTEM and SYSAUX) have both their metadata and data unloaded into the dump file.

For details regarding the requirements and limitations for full transportable export, see Transporting Databases in Oracle Database Administrator’s Guide for Release 18, 12.2, 12.1, or 11.2.

To migrate your source database to Exadata Cloud Service using the Data Pump full transportable export and import, you perform these tasks:

  1. On the source database, place all the user-defined tablespaces into read-only mode.

  2. On the source database host, execute Data Pump Export and perform a full transportable export.

    To perform a full transportable export, Specify the parameters FULL=YES and TRANSPORTABLE=ALWAYS.

  3. Transfer the Data Pump Export dump file and the datafiles for all of the user-defined tablespaces to an Exadata Cloud Service compute node.

  4. On the Exadata Cloud Service compute node, load the user-defined tablespace data files into ASM and Exadata Storage Server. If required, perform an endian format conversion at this stage.

    You can load and convert the data files by using the RMAN CONVERT command, or the PUT_FILE procedure in the DBMS_FILE_TRANSFER package.

  5. On the Exadata Cloud Service compute node, use Data Pump Import to load the metadata associated with the user-defined tablespaces, along with the data and metadata exported from the source database’s non-transportable tablespaces.

  6. Set the user-defined tablespaces on the Exadata Cloud Service database to read-write mode.

  7. After verifying that the data has been imported successfully, you can delete the dump file.