Golden Gate Initial Load Methods...

GoldenGate (Rel.11) provides multiple choices on performing Initial Load for any Migration or DR setup apart from other Legacy methods such as RMAN backup/restore, cloning etc.,

I am working on migrating 10g database from HP unix to 11gR2 Linux. Pretty simple migration one can think...
The catch is we are dealing with databases ranging from 2TB to 40TB.
So, XTTS (Cross Platform Transportable Tablespaces) is also not an option with 40TB database.

So, went with GoldenGate and trying to chose the best Initial Load methodology and thought of sharing that info here.

Below are the Initial Load GoldenGate methods:

Opt#	Option	Concept	Pros	Cons	Met#
1	Loading Data from File to Replicat	Initial load extract writes the records to an external file which Replicat uses to apply the changes to the target site.		Quite a slow initial-load and cannot be used due to limitations such as column size/data-type limitations.	1441172.1
1.a	Loading Data from Trail to Replicat	Initial load extract writes the records to a series of external files which Replicat uses to apply the changes to the target site.	Faster than #1 because replication can begin while extraction is already started. It can also process a near unlimited amount of tables.		1195705.1
2	Loading Data from File to Database Utility	Initial load extract writes the records to an external ASCII files. These files are uses as datafiles at target by a data bulk load utility native to the database such as SQLLoader			1457989.1
3	Loading Data with an Oracle GoldenGate Direct Load	Initial load extract extracts the records and sends them directly to a Replicat initial-load task.	Faster	No support for LOBs, LONGs and UTD's and any other data-type larger than 4K.	1457164.1
4	Loading Data with a Direct Bulk Load to SQL*Loader	Initial load extract extracts the source records and sends them directly to an initial-load Replicat task, which is dynamically started by manager. The initial load Replicat task interfaces with the SQL*Loader API to load the data as a direct-bulk load		No support for LOBs, LONGs. Only works with Oracle's SQLLOADER.	146185.1

As you see none of the above, method 1, 1a, 3 and 4 are not going to work for my situation as we have plenty of CLOB's, LONG's and UTD's (User Defined Datatype).
So only option left is #2 and I really did not want to use that method as our databases are not in GB range but TB's and trying to extract the data into ASCII file and storing them on source and transferring to target over network and load them... no. not really an option to chose from.

So, what's my option for Initial load then?

I propose pure legacy method using EXP(dp)/IMP(dp)  as this will be lot faster than option#2 and merely there is no other option left.

Check the note below:

999

EXP/IMP

Big UNDO as this will be with SCN

1276058.1

Also planned on moving more than 50% of 40TB data to Target prior to starting Extract process to reduce the overall migration time.

Reach me out for more details on this monster migration.