Cross-platform Transportable Tablespaces made easy

Comparto un post muy interesante sobre Transportable Tablespaces publicado por Harald van Breederode en su blog: https://prutser.wordpress.com/

Back in Oracle8i the Transportable Tablespace feature was introduced to make it convenient to transport a large amount of data between databases. In Oracle10g this useful feature was enhanced with cross-platform support which allowed a tablespace, or set of tablespaces, to be transported between databases deployed on different hardware platforms (even between platforms with a different endian format).

So until now the procedure to transport a tablespace set across platforms was as follows:

Place the tablespace set in read-only mode on the source database.
Verify that the tablespace set is self-contained.
Export the tablespace set’s metadata from the source database using the EXPDP utility.
Convert the datafile(s) to the target platform endian format using RMAN on the source database server.
Copy both the metadata dumpset and the (converted) datafile(s) to the target database server.
Convert the datafile(s) to the target database endian format using RMAN on the target database server.
Import the metadata dumpset into the target database using the IMPDP utility.
Place the tablespace set in read-write mode on the target database.
Note: You either perform step 4 or step 6 but not both.

As the list shows, RMAN, EXPDP and IMPDP have to be used to transport tablespace(s) across platforms. Also the RMAN CONVERT statement used in either step 4 or 6 operates only on datafiles.

What if this procedure was simpler and faster?

A cool new Oracle Database 12c feature is the ability to transport tablespaces across platforms using just RMAN and RMAN (compressed) backupsets! Lets see how this works by transporting a tablespace from Oracle Linux to Oracle Solaris.

SQL> select banner from v$version;

BANNER
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Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition Release 12.1.0.2.0 - 64bit Production
PL/SQL Release 12.1.0.2.0 - Production
CORE    12.1.0.2.0      Production
TNS for Linux: Version 12.1.0.2.0 - Production
NLSRTL Version 12.1.0.2.0 - Production