Oracle dump / dmp files

From: Peter Robson <peter.robson_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:24:06 +0000
Message-ID: <241f7001001160724qae180f0o440448cd210dda40_at_mail.gmail.com>



I ran into a problem the other day which eventually had me very angry with the software that Oracle provides for managing their export files.

Basically, I had an old .dmp file, carefully preserved from an earlier version of Oracle some years old from which I wanted to extract just a couple of tables. So I ran up import using the 'show' arguement. I eventually got most of the DDL, but the process always terminated with this error: IMP-00098: Internal Error: impgst2. So I tried every which way I could to explicitly identify the tables I wanted to extract, but I could make no progress at all, always a premature termination with that error. A search of the web threw up some fairly useless comment, all of which suggested that it was time to contact Oracle support.

Rubbish! After a lot more searching, I found a neat program called Nxtract ( http://www.kiyoinc.com/nxtract/index.html) which did exactly what I wanted in a few moments. It is completely stand-alone - critically it does NOT require that you have a copy of Oracle running on your machine. The interface is simple - at the dos command (sorry, Windows!), '>nxtract file.dmp' or variants specifying the table you require. NOTICE that no username or password is required, let alone authenticating the status of that user with regard to the user who created the export file in the first place. Output is a tab-delimited text file.

Having wasted hours and hours going round the houses with the Oracle software, and even more astonishingly, not finding anyone in the Oracle sphere who could point to this solution, I thought you guys at the least should be made aware of it!

But I'm still left with the question of why such a very useful facility has not emerged from Oracle itself? Actually, Quest (I believe) do something similar in Toad, but as I don't have Toad, and do not want to install anything with as many system tentacles onto my laptop, I gave them a miss. Nxtract is just so easy to install and use. Oh, and I have no connection with the company at all. The 'free' version gives you an export of up to 5,000 rows. For more, you must pay.

sigh!

Peter

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Received on Sat Jan 16 2010 - 09:24:06 CST

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