The other day, I was helping my boss, Roy, with a benchmark for our session Data Pump New Features and Best Practice at Oracle DatabaseWorld at CloudWorld. I needed to find a database with access to very fast storage, and I decided to use a Base Database Service in OCI.

But the fast storage is on ASM. I never tried exporting with Data Pump to ASM storage. Is it possible?

How to Export to ASM Storage?

First, I create a directory in ASM:

ASMCMD> cd DATA
ASMCMD> mkdir DATA_PUMP

Then, I create a database directory pointing to the ASM directory:

SQL> create myasmdir as '+DATA/DATA_PUMP';
SQL> grant read, write to ... ;

And start a Data Pump export:

expdp ... \
   directory=myasmdir \
   dumpfile=exp%L.dmp \
   logfile=exp.log

It fails:

Connected to: Oracle Database 19c EE Extreme Perf Release 19.0.0.0.0 - Production
ORA-39002: invalid operation
ORA-39070: Unable to open the log file.
ORA-29283: invalid file operation: nonexistent file or path [29434]

It turns out that the ASM directory can’t hold the log file. You must store it in a regular file system.

I create an additional directory for the log file:

SQL> create mylogdir as '/tmp';

Start the Data Pump export, now, redirecting the log file to regular storage:

expdp ... \
   directory=myasmdir \
   dumpfile=exp%L.dmp \
   logfile=mylogdir:exp.log

Appendix

When you work with Data Pump in Oracle Database 19c, you should always install the Data Pump bundle patch. In 19.20.0, we have more than 150 Data Pump specific fixes included.