exp file format / functionality blues

Dear Oraclers,

after being responsible for administering and developing an Oracle based database, I find myself getting the blues whenever I think of the ``exp'' and ``imp'' programs. Perhaps, I use these programs inadequately, or I overlook obvious things. At this point, however, my impression is that I've run into a field which is somewhat less than optimally supported by Oracle. At any rate, I'd like your opinion. I have Oracle 8.0.5 running under Compaq Tru64 OSF/1 4.0e (the platform formerly known as DEC Alpha).

The central problem for me is that ``exp'' produces non-text, "binary" output. This makes it effectively impossible to solve problems by simply editing the *.dmp files created by ``exp''.

The main problems which I cannot seem to solve are:

• I have two installations of my database, one for development & messing up things, the other for production. Both use different users and tablespaces. It seems impossible to import a dump of the production database into the development database, because ``imp'' insists to create the tables in the tablespaces they were exported from (apparently, this is in the CREATE TABLE statements embedded in the *.dmp file).
• Sometimes, I want to change the database structure. One convenient way to do this would be to run ``exp'', then drop all tables, then create the new tables, and finally reload the data (not the schema) from the *.dmp file. However, this procedure results in lots of errors, which sometimes can be worked around, sometimes not (in a recent case, ``imp'' caught some internal exception and exited "due to multiple internal errors"; the last record which it tried to import was obviously garbled, presumably because the program somehow got out of frame while reading the binary data representations).

So, has anyone here come across these troubles too? Are there other ways to do the things I'd like to do?

Personally, I consider it a questionable design that ``exp'' generates files that cannot be processed with a standard text editor.

Greetinx & thanx in advance, Jan

-- 
 +- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+
 |             email: kim_at_mpiz-koeln.mpg.de                           |
 |             WWW:   http://www.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/~kim/              |
 *-----=<  hierarchical systems are for files, not for humans  >=-----*