In 9i, I used to export and then gzip the dump file, but with 10g, oracle expdp could compress the METADATA, but with 11g, I can compress everything. Yes, expdp of 11g has more compression options than erstwhile 10g
$ expdp help=y : COMPRESSION Reduce the size of a dump file. Valid keyword values are: ALL, DATA_ONLY, [METADATA_ONLY] and NONE. :
I did a comparison between 11G’s expdp, 11G’s expdp + compression=ALL, 11G’s expdp + GZIP and exp + pipe node + GZIP on a database of size 2GB(approx) and below table describes the size of the dump file.
| Sno | Scenario | Size in MB |
| 1 | Expdp | 2226 |
| 2 | expdp + compression=ALL | 522 |
| 3 | expdp + gzip | 425 |
| 4 | exp + pipe node + gzip | 424 |
There wasn’t much notable difference in the time taken. Whatever, I would go for the 11g expdp with compression=all than erstwhile exp.
