Oracle: exp – EXP-00008: ORACLE error 904 encountered/ORA-00904: “POLTYP”: invalid identifier
I spent a bit of time this afternoon trying to export an Oracle test database so that we could use it locally using the exp tool.
I had to connect to exp like this:
exp user/password@remote_address
And then filled in the other parameters interactively.
Unfortunately when I tried to actually export the specified tables I got the following error message:
EXP-00008: ORACLE error 904 encountered ORA-00904: "POLTYP": invalid identifier EXP-00000: Export terminated unsuccessfully
I eventually came across Oyvind Isene’s blog post which pointed out that you’d get this problem if you tried to export a 10g database using an 11g client which is exactly what I was trying to do!
He explains it like so:
The export command runs a query against a table called EXU9RLS in the SYS schema. On 11g this table was expanded with the column POLTYP and the export command (exp) expects to find this column.
I needed to download the 10g client so that I could use that version of exp instead. I haven’t quite got it working yet but at least it’s a different error to deal with!
