Using impdp/expdp with RDS Oracle on AWS

Question

I'm very new to Amazon web services, especially using their RDS system. I have set up an Oracle database (11.2) and I now want to import a dump we made locally from our server using expdp. Apparently, the ability to use expdp/impdp on AWS is quite new. From what I understand, when creating an ORACLE database on RDS, a DATA_PUMP_DIR is automatically created. What is less obvious is how to access this directory and made our local dump available to RDS. I've tried to read the following information http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Oracle.Procedural.Importing.html on their website. But there is a lot of things I don't understand:

• Why do I have to setup an EC2 instance when the dump file is actually on my local computer (and I can access remotely the RDS database using sqlplus or sql developper)
• They are often using the 'sys' or 'system' user in their examples but, when reading the security settings for Oracle, it said that these users are made unavailable on RDS => you cannot connect to a database as Sysdba.

Could someone please point me to a simple and clear tutorial on how to use impdp on AWS ?

Thanks

Solution 1

It is possible to use Data Pump on RDS now.

duduklein's answer was correct when he wrote it. But the RDS docs now have details about using Oracle Data Pump. The doc page url is unmodified from the link as originally posted in the question (nice job, Amazon!) but it has new content on using Data Pump now.

Solution 2

It's not possible for now. I have just contacted amazon (through the premium support) for the same issue and they just told me that this is a feature request that was already passed to the RDS team, but there is no estimation of when this will be available.

The only way you can import files dumps is using the "exp" utility instead of the "expdp". In this case, you can use the "imp" utility to import data to RDS