ORA-00439: feature not enabled: Deferred Segment Creation

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If you are wondering why after exporting with EXPDP a schema from an Oracle Enterprise Edition 11gR2 database and importing it on an Oracle Standard Editon 11gR2 you are getting errors like:

ORA-00439: feature not enabled: Deferred Segment Creation

then you must know you have just hit one of the new features of 11gR2. Unfortunately this feature makes the life of the casual DBA a little bit more complicated than necessary.

I found an interesting debate about whether this must be considered a feature or a bug in the OTN forums but I very much appreciated the last comment where Michiel provided a working solution without delving into philosophical matters. I remember doing the same thing when dealing with another EXPDP/IMPDP problem between versions 11.1.0.6 and 11.1.0.7.

-- on the source instance
EXPDP user/pwd dumpfile=somename.dmp directory=DATA_DUMP_DIR nologfile=Y version=10.2

-- on the target instance
IMPDP user/pwd dumpfile=somename.dmp directory=DATA_DUMP_DIR nologfile=Y version=10.2

If there are any 11g features that need to be preserved across the import, then you will need to find an alternate solution, like artificially populating the empty tables that seem to trigger this problem or re-create manually the failing objects, until Oracle comes up with some command line switch for EXPDP or IMPDP to turn off or ignore the deferred segments option.

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