How To Fix ORA-31600 During Import Datapump

One day I was trying to run an import datapump job, and it kept failing. The error was pointing to one of the parameters being incorrect.

ORA-39005: inconsistent arguments
ORA-31600: invalid input value NULL for parameter VALUE in function DBMS_DATAPUMP.METADATA_REMAP

I opened up the parameter file to check for errors, and everything seemed ok. I couldn’t spot the error.
After a few minutes of looking and analyzing, I found something in the parameter file, that seemed like it might be the problem.

An empty space after the “:” in the REMAP_TABLESPACE clause, just as below:

REMAP_TABLESPACE=HR_INDEX:HRTEST_INDEX, HR_DATA: HRTEST_DATA

Looks like, you should not have an empty space after the “:” sign in the REMAP_TABLESPACE clause.
The above clause should look just like this:

REMAP_TABLESPACE=HR_INDEX:HRTEST_INDEX, HR_DATA:HRTEST_DATA

Once the extra space was removed, the import worked like a charm, just like it was supposed to.

The extra space after the “:” was the problem. Once I removed it, the import worked.

The same rule applies for REMAP_SCHEMA as well. If you have a space after the “:”, the import will fail with the same error.

If the space is before the “:” then the error changes to: UDI-00014: invalid value for parameter, ‘remap_schema’

The lesson here is, no empty spaces around the “:” in any of the remap clauses of the import datapump!

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