Oracle’s Conventional Export (exp) May Cause Problems

Sometimes it’s desired to move data from production to test or development environments, and if done with the original exp/imp utilities, issues can arise since these were written for database versions older than 9.x. Those utilities don’t support features found in newer database versions, which can create performance problems.

Tables with Top-n or hybrid histograms, when exported with exp, won’t get those histograms replicated to the destination database; both Top-n and hybrid histograms will be converted to Frequency histograms. Looking at a table in 12.1.0.2 (from an example by Jonathan Lewis) let’s see what histograms are present:


COLUMN_NAME              Distinct HISTOGRAM          Buckets
-------------------- ------------ --------------- ----------
FREQUENCY                     100 FREQUENCY              100
TOP_N                         100 TOP-FREQUENCY           95
HYBRID                        100 HYBRID                  50

Using legacy exp the table is exported. Importing this into another 12.1.0.2 database using legacy imp the histogram types have changed:


COLUMN_NAME              Distinct HISTOGRAM          Buckets
-------------------- ------------ --------------- ----------
FREQUENCY                     100 FREQUENCY              100
TOP_N                         100 FREQUENCY               95
HYBRID                        100 FREQUENCY               50

Note that the Oracle release is the same in both databases; it’s the exp/imp utilities creating the problem. Using datapump to transfer the data would have preserved the histograms. If there are scripts in use that use these old utilities it’s probably time to rewrite them to take advantage of datapump export and import.

It’s sometimes easier to use what’s already written but in the case of conventional export and import it’s time to retire these scripts when using Oracle releases that support datapump.

See all articles by David Fitzjarrell

David Fitzjarrell
David Fitzjarrell
David Fitzjarrell has more than 20 years of administration experience with various releases of the Oracle DBMS. He has installed the Oracle software on many platforms, including UNIX, Windows and Linux, and monitored and tuned performance in those environments. He is knowledgeable in the traditional tools for performance tuning – the Oracle Wait Interface, Statspack, event 10046 and 10053 traces, tkprof, explain plan and autotrace – and has used these to great advantage at the U.S. Postal Service, American Airlines/SABRE, ConocoPhilips and SiriusXM Radio, among others, to increase throughput and improve the quality of the production system. He has also set up scripts to regularly monitor available space and set thresholds to notify DBAs of impending space shortages before they affect the production environment. These scripts generate data which can also used to trend database growth over time, aiding in capacity planning. He has used RMAN, Streams, RAC and Data Guard in Oracle installations to ensure full recoverability and failover capabilities as well as high availability, and has configured a 'cascading' set of DR databases using the primary DR databases as the source, managing the archivelog transfers manually and montoring, through scripts, the health of these secondary DR databases. He has also used ASM, ASMM and ASSM to improve performance and manage storage and shared memory.

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