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1. How do you export particular rows from a table? Backup and Recovery Tips
How do you export particular rows from a table?
For the purposes of this paper, assume I have the following EMP table:
SQL> SELECT ID, ENAME, MANAGER_ID, DEPT_ID, SALARY FROM EMP;
ID ENAME MANAGER_ID DEPT_ID SALARY
---------- ------------------- ---------- ---------- ----------
1 BENJAMIN BRITTEN 50 2500
2 WOLFGANG MOZART 1 41 1450
3 FELIX MENDELSSOHN 1 31 1400
4 LUDWIG BEETHOVEN 1 10 1450
5 GUSTAV MAHLER 1 50 1550
6 DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH 2 41 1200
7 EDWARD ELGAR 2 42 1250
8 HENRY PURCELL 2 43 1100
9 AARON COPLAND 2 44 1300
10 ARAM KHATCHATURIAN 2 45 1307
The question is, therefore, given these 10 records in the EMP table, is it possible to export
just the 5 records relating to Manager 2?
The answer is that it is possible to do this, using the QUERY parameter. The basic idea
would be to perform the export like this:
C:>EXP SCOTT/TIGER TABLES=EMP QUERY=”WHERE MANAGER_ID=2”
When we issue this command, this is what happens:
EXPORT: RELEASE 9.0.1.1.1 - PRODUCTION ON THU OCT 25 11:07:37 2001
(C) COPYRIGHT 2001 ORACLE CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
ABOUT TO EXPORT SPECIFIED TABLES VIA CONVENTIONAL PATH ...
. . EXPORTING TABLE EMP 5 ROWS EXPORTED
EXPORT TERMINATED SUCCESSFULLY WITHOUT WARNINGS.
…and you’ll notice that the export really did include just the 5 rows we’d expect to be
selected.
Note the syntax here, though: QUERY=”WHERE MANAGER_ID=2”. This looks almost like a
‘WHERE’ clause for an ordinary SQL statement – but why are those backslash characters
there? The reason is that double quote marks are a reserved character for many Operating
Systems, Unix and NT amongst them. Other such characters include “$”, “<”, “>” and
single quotes, amongst others). So if you want them passed correctly to the export utility,
you have to ‘escape’ those characters to get them interpreted as literals. That means
including a special character just prior to the one you want interpreted literally, and this
special character is the backslash.
Copyright © Howard Rogers 2001 26/10/2001 Page 1 of 3

2. How do you export particular rows from a table? Backup and Recovery Tips
This ‘escaping’ of characters makes for some rather messy export parameters, of course,
and you should test them carefully before relying on them. It’s easy to make a mistake.
The way I do it is to write the bare WHERE clause as though it was an ordinary select
statement:
WHERE DEPT_ID>35 AND ENAME LIKE ‘D%’
Then I stick double quotes around the whole thing:
“WHERE DEPT_ID>35 AND ENAME LIKE ‘D%’”
And then I stick an escape character in front of anything that looks vaguely suspicious (i.e.,
anything that isn’t the usual sort of alphanumeric text):
“WHERE DEPT_ID>35 AND ENAME LIKE ‘D%’”
Finally, type in the rest of the export string at the start:
EXP SCOTT/TIGER TABLES=EMP QUERY=“WHERE DEPT_ID>35 AND ENAME LIKE ‘D%’”
…and that works, producing the expected 1 row export for Mr. Shostakovich. (Incidentally,
and just to keep you on your toes, if you escape the ‘greater than’ symbol on NT, it does
NOT work, complaining instead about ‘invalid characters’. But on Unix (well, Solaris at
any rate), the thing will only work if the escape character is present at that point. It all
goes to show that character escaping is O/S dependent, and rather sensitive).
Miscellaneous Points
The QUERY parameter you supply is applied by Export to all objects that would come
within the scope of its export acitivities. But a WHERE clause in a select statement clearly
only has applicability to particular tables. So, for example, if I did this sort of export, I
could expect somewhat awkward results:
EXP SCOTT/TIGER TABLES=EMP,DEPT QUERY=”WHERE SALARY>1000”
ABOUT TO EXPORT SPECIFIED TABLES VIA CONVENTIONAL PATH ...
. . EXPORTING TABLE EMP 10 ROWS EXPORTED
. . EXPORTING TABLE DEPT
EXP-00056: ORACLE ERROR 904 ENCOUNTERED
ORA-00904: INVALID COLUMN NAME
EXPORT TERMINATED SUCCESSFULLY WITH WARNINGS.
You’ll see at once what the problem is: the query for a test on the SALARY column is being
applied to both the tables listed in the TABLES parameter –yet the test only makes sense
for the EMP table, since departments don’t get paid salaries.
Copyright © Howard Rogers 2001 26/10/2001 Page 2 of 3

3. How do you export particular rows from a table? Backup and Recovery Tips
Clearly, in some circumstances, applying the one selection test to a group of tables is
exactly what you’d want to be able to do, and it’s good that the feature is there to
support it. But under many (if not most) circumstances, it’s going to be an absurd thing to
attempt.
And for that reason, you can’t specify a QUERY parameter if you’ve selected to do a full,
user or transportable tablespace export. (It would be ridiculous to spend time searching
for a salary column amongst the 300 objects being exported as part of a complete SCOTT
export, for example).
Incidentally, I’ve just given a hint about another problem associated with specifying a
QUERY parameter: it takes time to search through records. That means you can’t use such
a parameter if you are also doing a direct path export (i.e., where you’ve set DIRECT=Y),
since direct path exports bypass the usual SQL evaluation process altogether, and there
would thus be no opportunity to perform the required record searches. If you try
combining the two parameters, then, you’ll simply get an error:
EXP-00071: QUERY PARAMETER NOT COMPATIBLE WITH DIRECT PATH EXPORT
EXP-00000: EXPORT TERMINATED UNSUCCESSFULLY
Finally, be aware that the QUERY parameter was only introduced in Oracle version 8.1
(8i). If you’ve got a version earlier than that, none of the above discussion applies to
you (and you ought to think about upgrading!).
Copyright © Howard Rogers 2001 26/10/2001 Page 3 of 3