That's true stmontgo, but recall that ...

i) this is a data transfer to a different machine, with network overhead included as well
ii) it's only done once per month
iii) the target is a test database -- I'm guessing it's not sized as a production system, nor is the increased load due to frequent committing going to affect anyone else.

So although you are quite, this may be a circumstance where it would be an acceptable sacrifice.

By the way football, one of the side effects of using the COPY command in this way is that you can put an ORDER BY on the select statement, and if your COPY fails on a big data transfer you can determine where it failed (by querying the target table) and start off the copy again half way through by putting a condition on the SELECT. This works best when you ORDER by a very selective column, and can get Oracle to use an index to get the rows in the correct order -- you don't want to be doing large sorts on your production database, I'm thinking