Creating smaller copies of production

Creating a smaller copy of a production environment is a very common task for a DBA (for development or test purpose), but many times your destination server doesn't have enough space to create a full copy of it! This can be easily solved using Data Pump, for example, let's say that you only have space for 70 percent of your production database. Now to know how to proceed, we need to decide if the copy will contain metadata only (no data/rows) or if it will include the data also. Let's see how to do this each way:

• Metadata-only:

  1. First, do a full export of your source database:

     $ expdp fcomunoz/alvarez@pdborcl content=metadata_only full=y 
     directory=datapump dumpfile=metadata_06192013.dmp
     

  2. Then, let's import the metadata and tell Data Pump to reduce the size of all objects extent to 70 percent; you can do this using the parameter TRANSFORM available with impdp; it represents the percentage multiplier that will be used to alter extent allocations and datafile...