Transportable Tablespaces (TTS)

Transportable Tablespaces (TTS) is an Oracle feature that lets you move one or more tablespaces between databases — including across different platforms — by physically copying the datafiles and transporting only the metadata via Data Pump. On terabyte-scale datasets, the time savings over a conventional export/import are significant.

How it works #

The process has three main steps:

1. Set the source tablespace to read-only.
2. Export the metadata with Data Pump (TRANSPORT_TABLESPACES).
3. Copy the datafiles to the target system and import the metadata.

-- Set tablespace read-only
ALTER TABLESPACE sales_data READ ONLY;

-- Metadata export (Data Pump)
-- expdp system/pwd TRANSPORT_TABLESPACES=sales_data \
--   DUMPFILE=tts_sales.dmp LOGFILE=tts_sales.log

-- After copying datafiles to the target:
-- impdp system/pwd TRANSPORT_DATAFILES='/u02/oradata/sales_data01.dbf' \
--   DUMPFILE=tts_sales.dmp LOGFILE=tts_import.log

When moving across platforms with different endianness, an RMAN conversion step (CONVERT TABLESPACE) is required before the import. Character set compatibility between source and target is also mandatory.

When to use it #

TTS is the natural choice when:

• migrating large historical datasets or data warehouse tablespaces between Oracle environments;
• downtime tolerance is low and a full export/import would take hours or days;
• consolidating multiple databases into a single target (e.g., upgrading to 21c on Exadata).

The main constraint is that the source tablespace must remain READ ONLY for the entire duration of the datafile copy. In high-availability scenarios, TTS is often combined with RMAN Incremental Backup to shrink the read-only window to the bare minimum.