The following conditions must be satisfied for you to use the direct path load method:
Tables to be loaded cannot be clustered.
Tables to be loaded cannot have Oracle Virtual Private Database (VPD) policies active on INSERT.
Segments to be loaded cannot have any active transactions pending.
To check for this condition, use the Oracle Enterprise Manager command MONITOR TABLE to find the object ID for the tables you want to load. Then use the command MONITOR LOCK to see if there are any locks on the tables.
For releases of the database earlier than Oracle9i, you can perform a SQL*Loader direct path load only when the client and server are the same release. This also means that you cannot perform a direct path load of Oracle9i data into a database of an earlier release. For example, you cannot use direct path load to load data from a release 9.0.1 database into a release 8.1.7 database.
Beginning with Oracle9i, you can perform a SQL*Loader direct path load when the client and server are different releases. However, both releases must be at least release 9.0.1 and the client release must be the same as or lower than the server release. For example, you can perform a direct path load from a release 9.0.1 database into a release 9.2 database. However, you cannot use direct path load to load data from a release 10.0.0 database into a release 9.2 database.
The following features are not available with direct path load:
Loading BFILE columns
Use of CREATE SEQUENCE during the load. This is because in direct path loads there is no SQL being generated to fetch the next value since direct path does not generate INSERT statements.