It's creating the indexes that are slowing you down. set indexes=n on the import and create after in parallel and nologging. I would set the indexes to be noparallel after the creation. the method of export has no relation to the speed of the import. On the export you should set compress=n, otherwise the import could fail if a super large extent was being created that was bigger than the amount of free space on one datafile. On the import you might want to use buffer=? and commit=y, otherwise you could run out of rollback. I'm guessing since it's aerial imagery and you call your database raster that these are raster images. You using oracle spatial? -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l