I had got an export of a database and had to import it to a new database. The only difference was that in new database few of the large tables were partitioned. So instead of partitioning it after the import, i thought about pre-creating the tables (with partitioning) and then run import with ignore=Y . Everything went fine. But later on the front end application gave some error and we came to know that default values for columns in some tables were not set. I did some googling and didn’t find much. Then i posted the same to OTN forums and came to know that if the table pre-exists, import doesn’t take care of default values of columns. Metalink note 224727.1 discusses this. So if you are pre-creating the tables and there are some default values for any columns, set it manually, don’t rely on import for this. Same is true for impdp as well.