Unloading data from Oracle?

I recently fielded a question about getting data out of Oracle quickly. Without much detail on the systems involved here is my answer:

Question:

I need to migrate data from Oracle to MySQL quickly (in less than 1 day). What are my options?

My answer:

Oracle does not supply an out-of-the-box unload utility.

Keep in mind without comprehensive info about your environment (oracle version? server platform? how much data? what datatypes?) everything here is YMMV and you would want to give it a go on your system for performance and timing.

My points 1-3 are just generic data movement ideas. Point 4 is a method that will reduce downtime or interruption to minutes or seconds.

1) There are 3rd party utilities available. I have used a few of these but best for you to check them out yourself for your intended purpose. A few 3rd party products are listed here: OraFaq . Unfortunately a lot of them run on Windows which would slow down the data unload process unless your DB server was on windows and you could run the load utility directly on the server.

2) If you don't have any complex datatypes like LOBs then you can roll your own with SQLPLUS. If you did a table at a time then you can easily parallelize it. Topic has been visited. Examples can be found by Googling sqlplus export csv.

3) If you are 10g+ then External Tables might be a performant way to accomplish this task. If you create some blank external tables with the same structure as your current tables and copy the data to them, the data will be converted to the external table format (a text file). Once again, OraFAQ to the rescue.

4) If you must keep systems in parallel for days/weeks/months then use a change data capture/apply tool for near-zero downtime. Be prepared to pay $$$. I have used Golden Gate Software's tool that can mine the Oracle redo logs and supply insert/update statements to a MySQL Database. You can migrate the bulk of the data with no downtime the week before go-live. Then during your go-live period, shut down the source database, have Golden Gate catch up the last remaining transactions, then open up access to your new target database. I have used this for upgrades and the catch up period was only a few minutes. We already had a site licenses for Golden Gate so it wasn't anything out of pocket for us.