Originally posted by DcsoBob
Until then, I have to do these exports, so I am attempting to reduce the load on my system and users. It appears that DIRECT is the way to go.

Given the fact that you had to do these exports as well, what would you recommend.
If you realy have no choice but to bend a head and perform thosefrequent exports, then yes, DIRECT is probably the way to go. I would think again about CONSISTENT=Y, though. If you are sure your export must represent a snaphot of your database in a point of time *as a whole*, then CONSISTENT=Y is a must. But in that case make sure you have properly sized rollback segments, so that one day your export won't blow up with ORA-1555. On the other hand, if you realy are only interested in the contents of your application audit table (and not directly related to other exported tables within the same point in time), you should use CONSISTENT=N. It will be faster and much less ORA-1555 error prone.

However my main point still stands. I'm 100% sure that your boss does not realise how useless those frequent exports realy are. If I were you I would put all my efforts to enlighten here about that! You are saying "legal requirements mean we need to show who has done what with an inmate". That's fine, but how can you asure that with exports???? Only physical backup with archived logs can guaranty this, exports are useless here! If you are relying on exports you allway live with the danger to loose 6 hours worth of data in that audit table. Dangerous, from the legal point of view ! And let your boss know that exports + archlogs simply can't be used together for any kind of recovery - I suspect she isn't aware of that.

What can I said about your boss being suspicious about "that the archives work as advertised"? Only that she is totaly ignorant about Oracle database basic conceptsd and that she is making fool of herself with such doubts. Hot backups have been around with Oracle for more than a decade, they are so much prooven technology that no serious Oracle DBA in 24x7 environment is even considering anything else as their main backup/recovery scenario.