You might be able to get the data into Oracle in a number of ways.You might get away with writing to/reading from a pipe rather than a regular file. The command mknod p /path/to/file will create the pipe. It's a special type of file that is a sort of buffer for data. If you then start your importing process (one of the first two options) reading it and then in another session run the export to it, you might not only save disk space but you will be doing both in parallel so you will save on the elapse time, i.e. 30 minutes to export plus 40 minutes to import (harder work for the database) might become 42 minutes for both together.

Of course this is dependant on the volume of data, disk structure (contention) and CPU load to a small extent however if these databases are on two separate servers, you can extend this trick even more. Consider the process actually requires three steps totalling 90 minutes:-You can:-You might find that this all runs in 40 minutes because there is less disk contention on the import side. Of course, it's just theory and is entirely dependant on what hardware is in play and what contention there actually is at the time.


Robin