title: Using impdp/expdp with RDS Oracle on AWS
body: <p>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 <a href="http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Oracle.Procedural.Importing.html" rel="nofollow">http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Oracle.Procedural.Importing.html</a> on their website. But there is a lot of things I don't understand:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>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)</li>
  <li>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.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Could someone please point me to a simple and clear tutorial on how to use impdp on AWS ?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>