My first take on reading this is that there is a byte sex issue (a/k/a "endianness") which is related the the underlying hardware's "native" byte order for 16, 32 and 64bit numbers.
When I worked on the internals of Thoroughbred's Business BASIC, we had to ensure that all "file resident" number were big-endian (forward byte sex) even on an Intel processor. (This issue dates back to the first port of Unix off of the PDP-11 and the nUxi message.) The S/360 and its descendants are all big endian-- the 0th byte of a multi-byte integer is the most significant, unlike the Intel 8080-- and x86-- architecture. The 68K was also big endian rather than little endian and the old NS 32032 was even weirder. Unless the DataBase engine makes an effort to handle all non-internal-code numbers in an interchangable format-- and with appropriately fixed sizes-- the binary form of the data file-- or container files, for a database-- will be incompatible if copied, bit for bit, from one machine architecture to another... but there is a performance impact to ensuring that all binary coded numeric fields have, across all architectures, a consistent and "machine independant" format. So taking container files from another architecture-- like x86-- and plopping it down on a machine using big endian as its byte sex, will not work. All of the data will likely need to be exported (and I'm not sure the export will be devoid of binary data!) and imported within the new architecture. pSeries has the same endianess of zSeries machines-- I recall that from my days learning S/360 assembler as well as working on files in AIX. -soup -- John R. Campbell Speaker to Machines souperb at gmail dot com MacOS X proved it was easier to make Unix user-friendly than to fix Windows "It doesn't matter how well-crafted a system is to eliminate errors; Regardless of any and all checks and balances in place, all systems will fail because, somewhere, there is meat in the loop." - me ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
