Platform and Endianess of a system

Question

How do i find the platform and endianess of a give system?

Answer 1

You  may use this SQL query to find the platform and endianess of a given system.

SELECT d.PLATFORM_NAME, ENDIAN_FORMAT FROM V$TRANSPORTABLE_PLATFORM tp, V$DATABASE d WHERE tp.PLATFORM_NAME = d.PLATFORM_NAME;

Answer 2

The endianness is a combination of HW and OS. That is, it is the property of processor plus the OS.

For example, IA-64 is a big endian under hp-ux but is a little endian under Linux.

 

Endianness is mainly a topic for applications that are data storage sturcture depenendent and the data is managed by the application directly. A good example here is, Oracle DB. You can not just move the Oracle DB file bettween hp-ux and Linux thought it is the same hardware because of the endianness. There are numerous tools to convert the 'endianness' including Oracles Datapump, RMAN etc.

 

However, if the physical file has to me moved using ftp, rcp etc for the application and the application dont have to worry about the endianness because normally the data storage is trasparent to the application and is handled by the OS.