If you've found a way to do this with datapump, I'd love to see it. (10gR2 that is). Datapump requires directory objects to be created, and is run as a job on the database. It doesn't have the same shell interaction like 'exp' and 'imp' ----- Original Message ---- From: "Kerber, Andrew W." <Andrew.Kerber@xxxxxxx> To: rjoralist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Friday, September 28, 2007 10:19:46 AM Subject: RE: Data Pump and compression Shrinking the metadata wouldn't help a lot, its just not that big. We export through a pipe and use gzip to compress it, and get pretty good compression of standard export files, I expect it would work with datapump files also if you are only using one output file.