Expdp / Impdp Tool.

Data pump is a new feature in Oracle10g that provides fast parallel data load. With direct path and parallel execution, data pump is several times faster then the traditional exp/imp. Traditional exp/imp runs on client side. But impdp/expdp runs on server side. So we have much control on expdp/expdp compared to traditional exp/imp. When compared to exp/imp, data pump startup time is longer. Because, it has to setup the jobs, queues, and master table. Also at the end of the export operation the master table data is written to the dump file set, and at the beginning of the import job the master table is located and loaded in the schema of the user.

How expdp is faster than exp, what oracle internally change to speed up datapump?

Data pump is block mode and exp is a byte mode. So, block mode is always faster than the byte mode

ORACLE Export (exp) vs Datapump (expdp)

ORACLE provides two external utilities to transfer database objects from one database to another database. Traditional exports (exp /imp) are introduced before 10g. Then from 10g, ORACLE introduced datapump (expdp / impdp) as an enhancement to traditional export utility.

Oracle Data Export and Import utility

The Import and Export utilities work together; Export sends database definitions and actual data to an export file and Import can read the file to perform many different tasks. You can use Export and Import for many important database tasks, such as restoring a table, generating CREATE scripts, copying data among Oracle databases, migrating among Oracle versions, and moving tables from one schema to another.