After 7 months of development, a year of beta testing, and 3 more months of building around infrastructure, AlderPump is shipping. Its official site is http://alderprogs.com.
Publicly available version comes in two flavors: Professional and Lite. In Professional mode with all features are enabled. The mode is available for first 30 days for evaluation or after buying a license. Lite mode with limited functionality is free. In this mode only current user's jobs can be monitored and managed. For job creation, four single-page wizards are enabled. They are to create table and schema mode export and import jobs. Command line generation for expdp/impdp is also there.
Looking at this in retrospective I must say choosing DataPump for automation wasn't very bright idea. DataPump is a new product and has ahead long way to evolve. Its interface changed quite a bit from 10.1 to 10.2 - this is why AlderPump is not really supporting 10.1 beyond checking for some quirks. Some promised functionality didn't work till later patches. Oracle 11.1 brought in new changes although not too revolutionary.
DataPump interface is quite obscure. Say, from developer's perspective division into modes is purely artificial. What is the difference between export in SCHEMA and FULL mode with schema filter? Why prefer one to another? Can one perform FULL mode import from dump taken in TABLE mode? (the answer is btw yes). Why there is a parameter to replace tables but not other objects?
Fortunately for AlderPump, expdp and impdp also suffer from artificial limitations - such as inability to mix INCLUDE and EXCLUDE filters (perfectly allowed by the API), specifying more than one expression filter (again, no limit), or applying metadata remaps basing on object types.
Needless to say, these restrictions are no subject for AlderPump which allows anything the API has exposed. Very fortunate for AlderProgs :)
Anyways, AlderPump has sailed. It is surprising how much work shipping takes, but the work was [almost] always fun so far. And ahead lies the best part: drafting plans for the next release. The time to throw in wild ideas with no real obligations, time to try new things without real need to make them working, time to travel away and claim this boosts creativity.
Publicly available version comes in two flavors: Professional and Lite. In Professional mode with all features are enabled. The mode is available for first 30 days for evaluation or after buying a license. Lite mode with limited functionality is free. In this mode only current user's jobs can be monitored and managed. For job creation, four single-page wizards are enabled. They are to create table and schema mode export and import jobs. Command line generation for expdp/impdp is also there.
Looking at this in retrospective I must say choosing DataPump for automation wasn't very bright idea. DataPump is a new product and has ahead long way to evolve. Its interface changed quite a bit from 10.1 to 10.2 - this is why AlderPump is not really supporting 10.1 beyond checking for some quirks. Some promised functionality didn't work till later patches. Oracle 11.1 brought in new changes although not too revolutionary.
DataPump interface is quite obscure. Say, from developer's perspective division into modes is purely artificial. What is the difference between export in SCHEMA and FULL mode with schema filter? Why prefer one to another? Can one perform FULL mode import from dump taken in TABLE mode? (the answer is btw yes). Why there is a parameter to replace tables but not other objects?
Fortunately for AlderPump, expdp and impdp also suffer from artificial limitations - such as inability to mix INCLUDE and EXCLUDE filters (perfectly allowed by the API), specifying more than one expression filter (again, no limit), or applying metadata remaps basing on object types.
Needless to say, these restrictions are no subject for AlderPump which allows anything the API has exposed. Very fortunate for AlderProgs :)
Anyways, AlderPump has sailed. It is surprising how much work shipping takes, but the work was [almost] always fun so far. And ahead lies the best part: drafting plans for the next release. The time to throw in wild ideas with no real obligations, time to try new things without real need to make them working, time to travel away and claim this boosts creativity.
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