Question

I have a large 10gb+ .dmp file that I need to convert to flat text files or SAS files.

I’m assuming the size of the file makes using an express edition of oracle db to rebuild the database then convert to SAS/text infeasable.

Any alternatives short of buying a license for oracle standard that would be easy to implement?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The express edition of 11g allows up to 11 GB of user data. Assuming you don’t import any indexes and if the dump file is small enough (obviously, there’s not a whole lot of room between 10+ GB and 11 GB) you should be able to import it into an 11g express edition database.

If you have more than 11 GB of user data, you could potentially do multiple conversions where you import half the tables, export that data to flat files, drop those tables, and then import the other half of the tables and export that data to flat files. Obviously, that’s more manual effort– you’d need to use the SQLFILE parameter of impdp to write the DDL to a file, then go through and figure out what to specify for the INCLUDE or EXCLUDE parameter to limit the set of tables you’re importing. But it lets you save on licensing costs.

If you do need to buy a license, you can probably use the personal edition which should be much cheaper than the standard edition or standard edition one.