Tip#13 Big Vs Little Endian

Little Endian means that the low-order byte of the number is stored in memory at the lowest address, and the high-order byte at the highest address. (The little end comes first.) For example, a 4 byte LongInt

Byte3 Byte2 Byte1 Byte0

will be arranged in memory as follows:
Base Address+0 Byte0
Base Address+1 Byte1
Base Address+2 Byte2
Base Address+3 Byte3

Linux, Windows use "Little Endian" byte order.

Big Endian means that the high-order byte of the number is stored in memory at the lowest address, and the low-order byte at the highest address. (The big end comes first.) Our LongInt, would then be stored as:

Base Address+0 Byte3
Base Address+1 Byte2
Base Address+2 Byte1
Base Address+3 Byte0

Solaris, HPUX, Apple Mac use "Big Endian" byte order.

In Oracle 10g, following SQL should tell you which operating systems follow which byte order,

select * from v$transportable_platform order by platform_id;

To transport tablespaces between OS with same byte orders (endianness), we don’t need conversion in other cases we do which can be done using RMAN. E.g. I need to transport a Tablespace from Linux (Little Endian) to Solaris (Big Endian)

RMAN> convert tablespace XXX to
platform ‘Solaris[tm] OE (64-bit)' 
db_file_name_convert '/app/oracle/oradata/mbs’,
'/app/oracle/rman_bkups';

Now this file can be copied over to the target Solaris system, and the rest of the steps are easy.