> Right now I am looking into datapump, but as this is 11.1 it's going to > be annoying at best. We are upgrading to 11.2 soon, so I will be able to > test this process more thoroughly and not in a prod environment (we are > building the 11.2 dev environment) Annoying? Do you mean like DP forcing logging even though the destination table and tablespace are both set to nologging when pulling over a DB link? That's the sole reason I needed to add direct path SELECT...INSERTs on all of our tables without LOBs for environment (schema) refreshing between two DBs on different servers. That alone saved 40-50% on the refresh run time. Then again, I'm currently on 10.1.0.5, but moving to 11.2 soon (I hope!). I'd post my solution here, but the main part is a 1200-line package body and probably not very useful to most. It reminds me that I want to blog about the need to define the package with "AUTHID CURRENT_USER" to workaround the inane and seemingly pointless security of the DBMS_METADATA package that is called from DBMS_DATAPUMP. Rich -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l