Migrating a 2TB database to a new operating system with different endianness

I recently moved a 2TB database from Linux, Oracle 11.1 to AIX, Oracle 11.2 using impdp with network_link and parallel options. The data was imported in about two hours and the indexes took another 7 hours. There was no downtime but we kept the users off the system while this was happening.

Here is the command I used on the new server:

nohup impdp system/secret NETWORK_LINK=olddb FULL=y  PARALLEL=25 &

Then you can run this to see which parallel process is importing which table:

impdp system attach
Import> status
Import> parallel=30 << this will increase the parallel processes if you want

I had created all the datafiles in the new database and created a db link named olddb beforehand. The servers were on the same local area network and the network was the bottleneck.

You can also read this on my blog.

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