Compressing the export through a named pipe worked great and I did the reverse fine without any loss of data. I also did this with success on data files (ie. a physical backup). Thanks for the info. Just to check I called Oracle Support to see if they were familiar with this technique and they said that they know of customers who do this but they know that some customers have experienced a loss of data when using the UNIX compress/uncompress command and that Oracle will not support this technique. I've
also used compress in the past on exports to transfer a database to another machine over my network and also had zero problems.
Before I put this technique into a production system I would like to know if anyone has experienced the "data loss" that Oracle Support mentioned? and if so please state your Oracle version and OS when replying.
