The improved performance of the Data Pump Export and Import utilities is attributable to several factors, including the following:
Multiple worker processes can perform intertable and interpartition parallelism to load and unload tables in multiple, parallel, direct-path streams.
For very large tables and partitions, single worker processes can choose intrapartition parallelism through multiple parallel queries and parallel DML I/O server processes when the external tables method is used to access data.
Data Pump uses parallelism to build indexes and load package bodies.
Dump files are read and written directly by the server and, therefore, do not require any data movement to the client.
The dump file storage format is the internal stream format of the direct path API. This format is very similar to the format stored in Oracle database data files inside of tablespaces. Therefore, no client-side conversion to INSERT statement bind variables is performed.
The supported data access methods, direct path and external tables, are faster than conventional SQL. The direct path API provides the fastest single-stream performance. The external tables feature makes efficient use of the parallel queries and parallel DML capabilities of the Oracle database.
Metadata and data extraction can be overlapped during export.