M
mfurgal
Guest
HPUX on PA-RISC is Big Endian. So is AIX and Solaris. HPUX on Itanium is Little Endian, but when we did the initial port of HPUX to Itanium, the HPUX engineer suggested that we make the database Big Endian so the migration would be easier and since the Itanium chips were much faster any performance penalty for byte-swapping would be hidden by the faster speed. This is why you can backup/restore between HPUX on PA-RISC and Itanium. Linux and Windows are Little Endian, so hence you must dump (to ascii or binary) to move from any Big Endian machine to Linux or Windows. Given modern day CPU speeds, if we were to start over, we would probably pick Little Endian and make databases compatible between all platforms, however there are always edge cases, where a customer would require every last bit of CPU speed and they would not be happy with this compatibly cost since they likely would not be changing platforms. In the end, currently, Little Endian is taking over the world. Windows and Linux are the largest growth platforms for deploying OpenEdge applications. With HPUX going away and the decline of Solaris in deployment the database deployments will end up being AIX (Big Endian), Linux (Little Endian) and Windows (Little Endian). It would not be too difficult to package up a migration tool that does the binary dump/load df export, user export, sequence export, etc to do this for you. But if you want it to make effective use of the hardware at hand, then a generic tool becomes much harder. Mike -- Mike Furgal Director – Database and Pro2 Services PROGRESS Bravepoint 617-803-2870 mfurgal@progress.com
Continue reading...
Continue reading...