Question

I have written the following query using the documentation at: Oracle Documentation to copy some data from a database/table on my production server to database/table on Sandbox server.

COPY FROM username1/passwd1@<production_IP> to username2/passwd2@<sandbox_IP> INSERT TABLE_C (*) USING
(SELECT * FROM TABLE_C WHERE COL_A = 4884);

However, I am constantly running into Connection failed error. Is there anything wrong with the query?

Answer 1

In a typical Oracle environment, you have TNS names set up. That’s a service to lookup the connection parameters for Oracle instances given an SID or service name. In it’s simplest form, TNS names is a file called tnsnames.ora located by the environment variable TNS_ADMIN (which points to the directory where the file is).

Given the SIDs PROD and SANDBOX, you can then copy the tables from the SQLPLUS command line utility:

COPY FROM username1/passwd1@PROD to username2/passwd2@SANDBOX
    INSERT TABLE_C (*) USING (SELECT * FROM TABLE_C WHERE COL_A = 4884);

Please note that this COPY command only supports a limited set of Oracle datatypes: char, date, long, varchar2, number.

If you don’t have TNS names set up, you’ll need to know the host name or IP address, the port number and the service name. The syntax then becomes:

COPY FROM username1/passwd1@//192.168.3.17:1521/PROD_SERVICE to username2/passwd2@//192.168.4.17:1521/SANDBOX_SERVICE
    INSERT TABLE_C (*) USING (SELECT * FROM TABLE_C WHERE COL_A = 4884);

To determine the SID and/or service name, you best have a look into the TNSNAMES.ORA file on the database server itself. If you are able to login to the database, you can use the following queries to determine the SID and service name (but don’t ask me which is which):

select name from v$database;

select * from global_name;

select instance_number, instance_name, host_name from v$instance;