Users of Amazon RDS for Oracle can now make use of Oracle’s Data Pump facility to move data rapidly between Oracle databases.

Amazon has announced support for Oracle Data Pump for Amazon RDS for Oracle. Data Pump is a feature that was added to Oracle 11g to provide a faster way to import and export data to and from Oracle databases.

Data Pump is essentially a parallel uploader and downloader that automatically manages multiple parallel streams of unload and load, achieving speeds up to 45 times faster than conventional methods. Data Pump jobs can be selective, with the ability to exclude or include any type of object depending on parameters.

The Amazon RDS support for Data Pump can be used to import or export data into or out of Amazon RDS from both on-premise databases and databases running on Amazon EC2. Amazon currently supports the network mode of Data Pump where the job source is an Oracle database.