Re: endian prder in binary data

Following up on Jim Kennedy, 18 Apr 2003:

> No. The vendor was non responsive when I asked. I believe the whole
> thing is a canard. I believe they just do not want to QA the different
> environments.

I'd say it's a bit of a canard. My understanding is that Net8 (and SQL*Net b4) handle the TCP/IP big-endian-to-little-endian conversions (and vicky-the-versa) automatically. This is in common with any type of TCP/IP connection, BTW. That's why you can use Windows clients to Sun workstations and not have a problem.

The thing to remember here is that ALL the data in Oracle is stored in binary, not just BLOBs. Some of it MAY be interpreted as characters or numbers by software, BLOBs are not. That's the main difference. Ie, for anything that is not a BLOB, Oracle will make an effort to translate the data into something we can see. For BLOBs, it just passes the stuff around unchanged.

So, if it stores it big-endian but you receive it little endian in your client, all you need is the normal TCP/IP conversion, nothing more nothing less. And vicky-the-other.

Of course: IMHO, YMMV, etc etc.

-- 
Cheers
Nuno Souto
wizofoz2k_at_yahoo.com.au.nospam