Importing data that is not yours

On a very frequent basis we have to import customer's data onto our servers so we can investigate software issues that we don't experience using test data.

These imports vary from 25mb to a 100gb. We always ask the customer to send us an export of the schema(s) as the version of oracle is from 7.3.2 upwards. We're on 8.1.7.2.

I'm writing a unix platform independant script that will take an export and import it one of our tablespaces.

I pre-create a dedicated tablesapce and user.

One of the issues is I want to strip out the storage clause from the export, depsite asking them not to, they always specify compress=y plus on some of the larger customer dbs the initial and next are huge!

I have done an imp indexfile and then used sed to strip out all the storage stuff and tablespace name, generating a script that can re-create the schema, but using the tablespace defaults rather than the contents of the export.

its not a 100% perfect though. I get the odd spurious line that doesn't get changed properly.

I would like to replace (using sed or whatever) everything from PCTFREE thru to the semicolon with STORAGE(MAXEXTENTS UNLIMITED PCTINCREASE 0);

I can't work it out.

Does anybody else do this on a regular basis, how do you do this?

thanks in advance

Well, off the top of my head...

Why not import the DDL first and then spool a script to alter the parameters you mentioned, then import your data.

You could always club a few of the exporters to death but that (as I have learned) can have serious consequences.

MH