Taking dump of tables in oracle 10g using PL/SQL procedure

Question

Hi Required immediate response,

I want to take dump of some selected tables from schema, can any body tell me is it possible? Can anybody provide procedure by execut

Answer 1

If you must use PL/SQL, and you're trying to create a file, then you'll need to have a directory defined with write access granted to your user. That's something your DBA can do. See the "create directory" command.

At that point, you can (1) call UTL_FILE to open a file and write rows to it or (2) create an "EXTERNAL TABLE" and copy the information to it or (3) use DBMS_XMLGEN or (4) use any of several other ways to actually write the data from the database to the file. All of these are in the Oracle docs. The PL/SQL Packages and Types manual is your friend for things like this.

Note that the actual file system directory has to be on the server where the database is located. So you may need to get access to that server to copy your file, or have somebody set up a mount or whatever.

Alternatively, you could set up a plsql web service that you could call to get your data.

But, personally, I'd just use exp. Or, if that's not available, Toad or some other front end tool (even SQL*Plus) where you can just write a simple SQL script and save the results.

If you're doing this for a homework assignment, my guess is they'll want a UTL_FILE solution.