On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 3:52 PM, Andrzej Hunt <andr...@ahunt.org> wrote:
>
>
> Unfortunately we have no choice but to use the backup format as we
> have to have to be endian-agnostic.
>
It's possible to modify Firebird to be endian agnostic - I did it for a
customer
some years ago. Works fine for metadata and structured data, but there's no
way to handle the contents of blobs. Firebird really doesn't know what's in
a blob,
so changing endianness would be a disaster.
Historically, Firebird was created aware of endian issues because it ran on
Vaxes and Intel machines. At the time, the performance impact of converting
binary data on every reference was prohibitive. Then for a long time,
different
endian machines ran in different shops - not many mixed Mac, Vax, and
Intel servers, so having databases of different natures was not a great
problem.
Then Apple switched endianness and the problem became slightly interesting
again.
Cheers,
Ann
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