Chris, is there some way to use the datapump WHERE clause to set your defined criteria for an incremental datapump export? Of course, if the tables don't have a TIMESTAMP compatible column, that might be problematic. I suspect that big Oracle advocates RMAN solutions over datapump incremental backups. That might account for the absence of your datapump solution. Regards, Gus On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 5:44 PM, Grabowy, Chris <chris.grabowy@xxxxxxxx>wrote: > We have been struggling with having Datapump exports complete every night. > Sometimes with execution times. Other cases with dump file sizes.**** > > ** ** > > We added the compress option and that helped with generating smaller dump > files with no obvious impact to the execution time, but that hasn’t really > helped with the overall execution time. **** > > ** ** > > We have played with the parallel option with some success.**** > > ** ** > > Anyway one of the DBAs updated the script to generate a datapump parm file > that contains a list of the tables that changed in the last two days. Even > though we execute datapump every night he felt it would be safer to generate > a list of changed tables for the last two days. He generates the list of > changed tables by querying dba_tab_modifications. With this change, the > datapump exports are obviously faster and the dump files much smaller.**** > > ** ** > > We still do a weekly full datapump export on Sundays.**** > > ** ** > > Anyway, were kind of scratching our heads and trying to figure out if this > could come back and bite us somehow. Paranoia is a required DBA trait…*** > * > > ** ** > > We do understand that when importing we might have to go back to the Sunday > save to import a table since it might have not been saved in any of the > incrementals. We are saving/organizing the log files to easily grep for the > desired table.**** > > ** ** > > I know that incremental was not a stable/valid option in the old export > tool, but you would think that Oracle would have figured out how to do > incremental datapump exports by now…using some sort of defined criteria. At > least, looking thru the doc I did not find such an option. Am I just being > naïve here and missing the bigger picture on the viability of a > datapump/export incremental feature?**** > > ** ** > > Thoughts? Suggestions? Insults?**** > > ** ** >