Data Pump Components

Oracle Data Pump is made up of three distinct parts:

• The command-line clients, expdp and impdp

• The DBMS_DATAPUMP PL/SQL package (also known as the Data Pump API)

• The DBMS_METADATA PL/SQL package (also known as the Metadata API)

The Data Pump clients, expdp and impdp, invoke the Data Pump Export utility and Data Pump Import utility, respectively. They provide a user interface that closely resembles the original export (exp) and import (imp) utilities.

The expdp and impdp clients use the procedures provided in the DBMS_DATAPUMP PL/SQL package to execute export and import commands, using the parameters entered at the command-line. These parameters enable the exporting and importing of data and metadata for a complete database or subsets of a database.

All Data Pump Export and Import processing, including the reading and writing of dump files, is done on the server. This means that the data base administrator (DBA) must create directory objects.

When data is moved, Data Pump automatically uses either direct path load (or unload) or the external tables mechanism, or a combination of both. When metadata is moved, Data Pump uses functionality provided by the DBMS_METADATA PL/SQL package. The DBMS_METADATA package provides a centralized facility for the extraction, manipulation, and resubmission of dictionary metadata.

The DBMS_DATAPUMP and DBMS_METADATA PL/SQL packages can be used independently of the Data Pump clients.