When would I use Transportable Tablespaces instead of Data Pump Export and Import?
You would use Transportable Tablespaces when you want to move an entire tablespace of data from one Oracle database to another. Transportable Tablespaces allows Oracle data files to be unplugged from a database, moved or copied to another location, and then plugged into another database. Moving data using Transportable Tablespaces can be much faster than performing either an export or import of the same data, because transporting a tablespace only requires the copying of datafiles and integrating the tablespace dictionary information. Even when transporting a tablespace, Data Pump Export and Import are still used to handle the extraction and recreation of the metadata for that tablespace.
