The import and export procedures read and write text files, and if you
use an external file when you import or export data, you can also import and
export blob data. The import procedures do not support read-once streams (live
data feeds), because the procedures read the first line of the file to determine
the number of columns, then read the file again to import the data.
The import and export procedures are server-side utilities that exhibit
different behavior in client/server mode. Typically, you use these procedures
to import data into and export data from a locally running
database. However, you
can use the import and export procedures when
is running in a server
framework if you specify import and export files that are accessible to the
server.