Full Transportable Export/Import

Fallback Strategies with Full Transportable Export/Import

Fallback Strategies with Full Transportable Export/ImportI received an interesting question about how to implement Fallback Strategies with Full Transportable Export/Import several times within the past weeks. So it may be a good idea to showcase some possible scenarios.

Full Transportable Export/Import is an Oracle 12c feature which allows you to do a transportable tablespace migration but Data Pump will take away all the manual steps with only one command. You may need to have markers to revert to in order to avoid restarting the entire operation from scratch again.

And there are some special behaviors to know about, at first with Full Transportable Export/Import but …

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Transportable Tablespaces – Does it work between SE2 and EE?

Transportable Tablespaces - Does it work between SE2 and EE?I thought I had blogged about this topic already. But it seems to be that I stored this information somewhere else. Randomly I receive this question: Oracle Transportable Tablespaces – Does it work between SE2 and EE?

In addition often the question gets precised: Does it work in both directions or just one-way?

Transportable Tablespaces and Full Transportable Export/Import

Please find more information about these two very common Oracle database migration features:

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PERL scripts for large migrations supported on all platforms (except Windows)

This topic fits very well as I present about +100 TB migrations today at the “Harmony” User Group Conference in Finland.

Finland May Helsinki 2017

Finland in May

The question whether the PERL scripts for RMAN incrementally rolled forward backups we deliver via MOS Note 1389592.1 (11G – Reduce Transportable Tablespace Downtime using Cross Platform Incremental Backup) will be supported for migrations to non-Exadata systems such as Oracle SuperCluster as well.

And yes, now we got an update into the note saying:

Although preferred destination system is Linux (either 64-bit Oracle Linux or a certified version of RedHat Linux), this procedure can be used

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Can you EXCLUDE tablespaces from Full Transportable Export/Import?

Question: Can you EXCLUDE one or more tablespaces when doing a Full Transportable Export/Import?

First of all, this question came up already twice in real world customer migrations. So it’s not a totally unusual question. In one case a tablespace called USERS got precreated and some data did get stored. In the second case we did use RMAN incremental backups to migrate a very large database (>100TB) and some tablespaces weren’t part of the backup set.

I did brainstorm with Roy – and I dug into my notes from some years ago when the question was raised to me as …

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Hands-On Lab available: Upgrade to Oracle Database 12.2.0.1

Thanks to Roy – our Hands-On Lab “Upgrade, Migrate and Consolidate to Oracle Database 12.2” is now available for download from OTN.

Instructions and technical requirements are clearly documented on the OTN page as well. The lab is based on Virtual Box and can be easily imported upon download and unzip.

You can always access the lab via the blog’s top menu as well:

HOL Link on the Upgrade Blog

Hands-On Lab – Access via the Blog

Inside the lab you’ll find :

  • UPGR – an Oracle 11.2.0.4
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Transportable Tablespaces and READ ONLY in Oracle Database 12c

We recently worked with a customer who noticed that they were not able to use transportable tablespaces to connect the same tablespace data files to two databases at the same time, even after setting the tablespaces READ ONLY in SQL*Plus. This is new behavior in 12c, and many customers are not yet aware of this change. Here are the details of what changed, why, and how you might want to deal with it if the changes affect your environment.

What Changed?

Starting in 12.1, data pump sets tablespaces read write during the import phase of a transportable tablespace …

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Full Transportable Export/Import – PAR File Examples

Roy and I blogged about Full Transportable Export/Import in the past:

If you haven’t heard of this database feature, it allows you to migrate a full database by using Transportable Tablespaces as a base technology but letting Data Pump do all the manual steps for you in a one-command migration. And if needed, it works with RMAN Incremental Backups as well in order to …

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Full Transportable Export/Import – Things to Know

This blog post is an addition to:

Seth Miller commented the pitfall of having a serious issue during the Data Pump run, Data Pump exiting and not finishing, and you’ll have to do the entire backup/restore/incremental-roll-foward thing again. Without any doubt, this is no fun at all.

So let me point out a few things to take into consideration – and some of them are not obvious I guess.

Do you need to backup/restore/incremental-roll-forward again?

When you let do Data Pump all the manual …

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Full Transportable Export/Import – Migrating an 11.2.0.4 database to Oracle Database 12c- into the Oracle Cloud

Full Transportable Export/Import – one of the coolest features in Oracle Database 12c 

We blogged about Full Transportable Export/Import a while back. It is – no doubt – one of the coolest features in Oracle Database 12c. And it is part of our Hands-On Lab exercise (Hands On Lab – Upgrade, Migrate, Consolidate to Oracle Database 12c) as well.

It utilizes the technique of Transportable Tablesspaces – cross-platform, cross- Endianness, cross-version – but lets Oracle Data Pump do all the “dirty” work of rebuilding everything kept in your SYSTEM and SYSAUX tablespace including views, synonyms, public objects, …

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Transportable Tablespaces – Characters Sets – Same same but different?

All credits go to Don Wolf, an Oracle Advanced Customer Support engineer from Ohio as he dug out this information 🙂 Thanks Don!

Do database character sets have to match EXACTLY for Transportable Tablespaces?

That sounds like a simple question. When you look into our big slide deck the answer will be a straight “Yes”. No doubts. Regardless if you would like to do Transportable Tablespaces or Full Transportable Export/Import your sources and your target’s database character sets must be equal. Otherwise Data Pump won’t allow you to process the meta data import.

But Don was wondering about slightly differing …

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Data Pump – Exclude Stats differently for TTS and FTEX

Nice little best practice for statistics and Data Pump when doing either Transportable Tablespaces or Full Transportable Export-Import (credits to Roy and Dean Gagne).

Transport Statistics via a Staging Table

First of all we always recommend to exclude statistics when doing a Data Pump export as the import of such stats takes way longer than transporting them via a stats table. If you are unfamiliar with transporting stats between databases please see the Oracle Performance Tuning Guide with a nice tutorial:

The basic steps to transport statistics from one database to another fast and

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