Can you time how long an Oracle import takes?

Question

I'm on a Windows machine with Oracle Client 11.1.0, and am going to import a database dump. I'm importing from the command line with the "imp" command.

Is there an option to time how long the import takes? I've searched around but haven't found anything for that yet.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If you just want to time how long it takes, you could call it via a batch file like this:

echo %DATE% %TIME% >> time.log
imp parfile=./file.par etc etc
echo %DATE% %TIME% >> time.log

Once everything has run through, have a look at the time.log file and work out the difference between the 2 values.

Answer 2

Short answer: NO.

The import does several things. One is creating tables and inserting data in it. Next come the indexes, constraints, triggers and other objects. There is no such thing as a prediction as how long it would take. For the reading of data, if the indexes, triggers and constraints don't play a role, you can assume this is a linear process, where normally 1GB takes 10 times the time of reading 100MB. For the other stuff this does not work but for the creation of a specific index - for example - you could check v$session_longops to find the time_remaining for that index creation. You still don't know what is next. To find what is next, you could create an sql file that contains the ddl that is to be executed. This could help in giving an idea what is still left to do.

Don't forget to specify a large buffer for imp.