dumb question- can you backup only data from tables? DBA sez no

Long story short- I trusted our DBA to solve the problem and he threw up his hands:

We have a client server app that connects to Oracle. For some reason we were getting more and more errors in the C/S app when connecting to data. No one here had the expertise to solve them, so we called in a consultant. Consultant resinstalled application and ran scripts which built the oracle 8i database. We took the export file of the original database, but every time our DBA imported it we got the same application errors. These were not oracle errors so I have no ORA numbers. We started again 3 times and each time during the import the data and our dba said- "the application is wrong, I give up."

I created the instance one more time via the setup scripts. I painstakingly generated insert statements for all the data using TOAD and then ran those insert scripts into oracle via sqlplus. A real pain. Problem was solved in 2 hours and the C/S application works fine.

It sounds to me like the export/import took information about the schema, users, roles, or in vague generalities- "data structure" outside of the data itself. When I imported just the data from the tables- no errors.

I am no maintenance DBA, I design tables in oracle for use in applications. How could we have used our export file to just import the data and not other elements of the export file (users, schema, etc)? what did our DBA do wrong and what does it show about his skills or lack thereof? (I'm kind of pissed I had to take this over.)

Thanks,

Don Received on Thu Mar 11 2004 - 09:00:25 CST