Re: endian prder in binary data

On 2003-04-11 05:38, Jim Kennedy <kennedy-downwithspammersfamily_at_attbi.com> wrote:
> Lets say I have a column of a raw or a blob. Lets say it is Oracle version
> 8.1.7.4 and is running on a Sun Solaris box. Lets say the client is running
> on Windows 2000. I am very sure that no matter that the client (w2k) and
> the server (Sun) are different endian architectures that the sqlnet will
> take care of the correct endian order.

I don't think so. The server doesn't know about any structures in the blob, so it cannot "take care" of the endian order. It gets a byte stream and returns the same byte stream. Interpreting the byte stream is up to the client.

> Why am I asking this? A vendor I deal with claims that since they are
> storing binary data in the database the application server (the client) and
> the database server (Oracle) must be on the same OS otherwise the endian
> problem.

Nope. The server and the client can be of different endianness. That's not a problem. However, if you had different clients with different endianness (for example a Sparc machine creating and storing the binary data and an Intel retrieving and interpreting it) that could be a problem.

        hp

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