What is Data Pump?

The Data Pump utility is a fully integrated feature of the Oracle database that was introduced within Oracle 10g as a replacement to the original export and import utilities. Data Pump is more powerful and flexible than the old utilities and provides, for example, high speed, fast object recovery, parallel read and write, data transformation (such as scrubbing sensible data), and compression. It also provides bulk data and metadata movement of Oracle database content, and also enables an efficient movement of data and metadata between Oracle databases independent of database versions and the OS platform involved.

Note

In previous versions of Oracle, we used to work with similar utilities named exp and imp. The exp utility was deprecated since Oracle 11g, but the imp utility is still supported by Oracle for migration purpose. The imp utility allows us to recover any backup generated by the old exp program. Just keep in mind that the use of exp is no longer supported by Oracle...