How do I append data with Oracle's impdp?

Question

Does impdp always truncate the table before it loads the data even if I don't recreate the meta data? If it does, is there an option to tell it to append the data instead?

Answer 1

What impdp does for existing tables is controlled by the TABLE_EXISTS_ACTION parameter.

impdp hr/hr TABLES=employees DIRECTORY=dpump_dir1 DUMPFILE=expfull.dmp TABLE_EXISTS_ACTION=APPEND

However, if you're already using CONTENT=DATA_ONLY which it sounds like you are TABLE_EXISTS_ACTION should be defaulting to APPEND so I'm not sure why you're seeing the behaviour you describe.