AlderPump

AlderPump provides real time monitoring and management of DataPump jobs. It comes with wizard allowing creation of new jobs and covering 100% of DataPump features - even those omitted in standard Oracle utilities expdp and impdp. AlderPump dumps are fully compatible and interchangeable with standard ones.

AlderPump monitors and manages DataPump jobs no matter how they were created. Launch jobs using command line with expdp/impdp, from within OEM, or AlderPump running on another computer - and monitor their progress from your machine. See log messages as they're generated, inspect job parameters, monitor state and progress of worker processes, pause, resume, or cancel the job - all from centralized console.

And should a job run into space or performance problem, resolve the issue by adding another dump file or changing degree of parallelism from "Params" tab. You can also post a custom entry to job's log and broadcast it to other users.

Perhaps the most powerful AlderPump component, Job Creation Wizard greatly simplifies creation of jobs. It provides access to all DataPump parameters, displays usage hints, and prevents errors by disabling parameters invalid for current combination of operation and mode. Consistency tab warns about incompatible use of options - we check about 150 combinations (and more are coming in next releases) to ensure jobs are launched smoothly. This feature along saves hours of documentation reading and Internet browsing.

Internally DataPump comes with flexible albeit extremely murky set of filters for specifying which objects should be processed. Command line utilities expdp and impdp simplify the picture by restricting available choices - at the cost of reduced functionality. AlderPump's "Object filters" tab does comprehensive jobs by exposing all available filters and ensuring they are valid for current combination of operation, mode, filter, and object type. But even with all these checks selecting objects correctly is a tough job. Objects Picker further simplifies the task by browsing database objects, types or tablespaces and marking them for inclusion or exclusion.

The Wizard comes in two flavors. Lite version available to all users, concentrates on quick tasks such as table export or schema import. It takes only few clicks to create and launch a job. Detailed tabs, available for registered users, reveal full potential of Oracle DataPump allowing fine grained control on job creation.

As mentioned before, AlderPump is using the same API as Oracle expdp/impdp - which guarantees 100% compatibility and interchangeability. Moreover, some features were omitted from Oracle's command line utilities but fully supported by AlderPump. For example, AlderPump allows to separate tables and indexes into designated tablespaces during import1. Or, load data into certain tables only - while with command line utilities it is all or nothing choice. On export, you may break output into multiple dump files limiting size of each file individually. Complete list of AlderPump improvements can be found in AlderPump features section.

Having GUI interface is good for one-off tasks, but what if job must be scheduled regularly in a batch file? AlderPump helps here by generating corresponding expdp or impdp command as you work. Whatever parameter is changed, it is immediately reflected on Command line tab ready to be copied to shell window or batch file. Thus you never get locked to exclusive use of AlderPump, there is always way out. A warning is displayed if some feature is not supported by Oracle command line tools. Command line generation is only available to registered users.

To utilize Oracle 11g features, you must either install 11g binaries on your computer or open shell window on a server machine. This is not always available nor desirable from security perspective. AlderPump works on any computer hosting Oracle client supported by .NET. This way you always have access to features of the database you are working on, not features of your client software. And if you want to be backwards compatible, there is "Compatibility" radio button on "Operation and mode" tab. The choice warns about features not supported at current compatibility level.

Get AlderPump and give it a try to see what it can actually do for you!