Export/Zip and Unzip/Import using UNIX Pipes

If you are creating and using large dump (.dmp) files with Oracle's export (exp) and import (imp) utilities, you can compress and uncompress the dump file as needed using gzip and gunzip (from GNU) or the unix compress and uncompress utilities.  One problem with this is that you will still have to have the large dump file on your disk at some point, which you may or may not have room for, and you may run up against the 2 Gig file size limit on some machines and Oracle versions.  Instead of doing the export and zip separately, creating an interim dump file (or doing unzip and import), unix has the ability to pipe the output from one program (such as exp) as input to another program (such as gzip) as they both run in parallel, without having to run the programs sequentially and without having to create interim files.

To do this, you would create a pipe (using the unix mknod command), run the programs (in either order), with the first one in the background (using "&" at the end), which use that pipe like a file, and then remove the pipe.   Below shows a full export to a zipped dump file:

mknod /tmp/exp_pipe p
gzip -cNf </tmp/exp_pipe >prod.dmp.gz &
exp system/systempassword file=/tmp/exp_pipe full=y compress=n log=prod.dmp.log
rm -f /tmp/exp_pipe

Below shows a full import with that zipped dump file:

mknod /tmp/imp_pipe p
gunzip -c prod.dmp.gz >/tmp/imp_pipe &
imp system/systempassword file=/tmp/imp_pipe full=y ignore=y buffer=1024000 commit=y \
     log=prod.log
rm -f /tmp/imp_pipe

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