ORA-31641: unable to create dump file

The Problem

You are attempting to execute the data pump utility and export some data from your database but when you run the command which was previously working without any errors you receive the following error:

ORA-31641: unable to create dump file “C:\Temp\export.DMP”

The Cause

There will, most likely, already be a file name “export.DMP” in the location that the directory within your database points to. Check the location of the directory by querying the DBA/USER/ALL_directories view in the database.

The Solution

You will need to delete the dump file and any log file that you are also attempting to create before you can run the export job again. For some reason it seems that it’s not possible to overwrite dump and log files using data pump.

Alternatively, you can add a unique variable to your command so that it will produce a different file name each time. Something like a time stamp works pretty well.

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Category: Data Pump