Oracle Datapump expdp for vcloud schema

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

Occasionally, a clone of a VCLOUD database is needed to upload to a VMware internal lab for analysis and research.
Gathering the VCLOUD data can be overwhelming and unnecessarily large.
Providing the entire/full customer database is unnecessary. In most cases, the VCLOUD dumpfile will only be a few Gig in size than hundreds of Gigs.
This article will guide a user to provide a minimal size of the VCLOUD database to be uploaded to the VMware script server, as well as save time and storage.

Resolution

Follow the steps below:

1. Log into the Oracle instance as sysdba:

sqlplus '/as sysdba'

2. Create a directory for the vcloud dump:

create or replace directory dumpdir_vcloud  as '/path/to/where/user/desire';

Note: If this already exists, skip to step 5.

3. Verify if the directory name and the path are correct:

SELECT directory_path from dba_directories;

4. Grant necessary privileges:

grant read,write on directory dumpdir_vcloud to public;

5. Exporting the VCLOUD schema:

Note: This command will provide the VCLOUD schema without the AUDIT_EVENT table. The AUDIT_EVENT table can account over 90% of the database size.

expdp VCLOUD/password  dumpfile=mycloudexport.dmp directory=dumpdir_vcloud schemas=VCLOUD exclude=TABLE:\"IN \'AUDIT_EVENT\'\" logfile=vcloud_dumpfile.log

Note: In some cases, the username and schema name may differ. Please adjust the parameters accordingly.

6. Before uploading to script server:

• Provide the log file of the datapump dump along with the datapump dump file.
• Zip the database dumpfile before uploading.