Throwing its two cents into the byte-ordering discussion, Oracle Corp says its database customers are forced to store their data in an endian-neutral format rendering the current big-endian versus little-endian debate of little significance. Remember we have been integrating big-endian MVS mainframe data with little- endian PC applications for years, it notes. More interesting for the current byte-ordering fracas however, is Oracle’s claim to be the only ISV which provides this endian-neutral functionality. Sybase Inc concurs with the endian issue. If you have data stored on a big-endian machine, you can today access this from anywhere on the network. So, NT machines (little-endian) can access data on a Unix RISC machine (big endian). It claims its replication technology enables data to be transferred between systems of different endian types. The application it’s putting together for the forthcoming soccer World Cup in France next month runs on NT laptops and desktops at the venues, which are connected to a data center and web sites are Unix based. The data center receives information from the NT laptops, and distributes it out to Unix and NT servers. Sybase didn’t know about endian- neutral. As far as migrating applications between Sun Microsystems Inc’s big-endian Sparc Solaris and little-endian Solaris x86, Sybase’s view is that applications running on Sparc will need to be recompiled to run on Intel but as they have a compatible API, does not see any issue here unless source is no longer available. For applications storing data somewhere other than a database, data will also need to be converted unless this has been solved. For HP users, it observes, although their HP- UX Unixes [on PA-RISC and Merced] are the same endian-ness, they will still find themselves in mixed environments where the database is running on Unix (Intel or RISC), but the application server is NT. At this point, all the same issues remain. Its belief is that in most cases the database engines will resolve most of the data issues, and the real problem will be the need to recompile the applications.
