Oracle Data Pump

What is Oracle's Data Pump?
Oracle simply states that Data Pump is a "very high-speed" mechanism for moving data and meta-data from one database to another. Is Data Pump a complete replacement for export (exp) and Import (imp)? Oracle clearly states that the only time you would/ should use the original (exp & imp) is when you need backward compatibility to an earlier version that does not have Data Pump export & import (expdp & impdp). Basically if you wanted to import a 10g export into a pre-10g database or import into a 10g database from a pre-10g database. As we go through this evaluation of Data Pump and its usage this will become more clear if there are any other situations. I venture to say there is.
Data Pump has three distinct components.
The uniqueness of Data Pump is that all processing is done through the database server and through DIRECTORY objects. To do this there are two internal packages to Oracle and an optional replacement for the original export and import command line utilities (exp & imp).
expdp & impdp
These to command line utilities are very close to the old standby export & import (exp & imp) utilities. They are not stand-alone utilities in the sense that they use the DBMS_DATAPUMP PL/SQL package to execute the export and import functions. They accept a variety of command line options that, like exp & imp, allow you to pick and choose the objects to be exported and imported.
DBMS_DATAPUMP
The Data Pump API and can be used independently of expdp & impdp. Is the package accessed to move data and / or metadata between databases.
DBMS_METADATA
The meta-data API in Oracle and can also be used independently of expdp & impdp. If you remember this is the package we were using in the last two articles for extracting meta-data. I am very interested in how it interfaces with Data Pump.

For more on Data Pumps:http://www.orafaq.com/node/67