The Data Pump architecture

Data Pump has a very simple mechanism that can interact with many other interfaces such as, Oracle Enterprise Manager and custom interfaces, and it is basically made up of three unique parts; they are:

• The command-line interfaces, expdp and impdp

• The DBMS_DATAPUMP package, also known as the Data Pump API

• The DBMS_METADATA package, also known as the Metadata API

As you can easily see in the following figure, the command-line interfaces, expdp and impdp, uses the DBMS_DATAPUMP package to execute the export and import operations using all the parameters passed in by the user in the command line. When metadata needs to be manipulated, it uses the DBMS_METADATA package to extract, manipulate, and also to recreate the dictionary metadata. Furthermore, due to this, the Data Pump packages are stored in the Oracle database by itself (DBMS_DATAPUMP and DBMS_METADATA). They can be directly accessed by any external application using PL/SQL, the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud...