Can I sync an existing database using a .dmp file? I have two oracle databases (production and lab). When I created the lab database I imported a .dmp file from production to copy the data. Now that the database has been running for a while the data is out of sync and I'd like to import again. What's the easiest way to do this?

I tried using imp again but it shows errors now since the tables are already there. I could delete the data files and re import I suppose.

Edit: This is what I've tried:

$ imp user/password file=MyExportFile.dmp

following statement failed because the object already exists:
CREATE TABLE ...
...
Import terminated successfully with warnings.
Next time, instead of "deleting everything", you can tell imp to ignore table creation error and still load the data by specifying the IGNORE=y option:

imp user/password file=MyExportFile.dmp IGNORE=y


There are few other considerations that you should make when importing into an existing schema, as outlined in the manual. Specifically, you may need to disable referential integrity constraints if they exists, otherwise some data may be rejected.