Oracle dump / dmp files

From: Peter Robson <peter.robson@xxxxxxxxx>
To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:24:06 +0000
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
Oracle dump / dmp files

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