dbexport and BYTE datatypes

While porting thru the park one day, I ran into an interesting and scary Informix data migration problem. The move was from a Solaris Sparc10 V5 Online Engine to a Solaris UltraEnterprise 3000 V7.2.0.UC3 Online engine. I found that onload/onunload wouldn't work and various sources explained that architectural differences were probably to blame in this case. Okay then. Use dbimport/dbexport right!? Well, KINDA. dbexport seems to work GREAT, as long as you are not using BYTE datatypes. Our one table stores pointers to our scanned images in a BYTE field. (nope, not using 'blobspace') After dbexport/dbimport, these byte pointers were GARBAGE!! After taking a little time to figure this out, I was fortunate enough to have the disk space to use dbaccess and unload the pointers manually and load them back where I needed them and I was okay, BUT, isn't this weird?? It's not an architecture thing, because I tried dbexporting one row to disk, then comparing it to a row I had unloaded. DIFFERENT! So the problem is obviously in dbexport, right?? What gives here?? I always assumed that dbexport was actually performing an action similar to a dbaccess/unload sequence, as pipe-delimited data files are the result in both cases... This is obviously NOT the case. Why not? This could potentially be a BIG problem/suprise to someone in a similar situation who did not have disk space to play with! Anyone out there run into this before? I'd like to hear about it, or any solutions that have been found. Thanks in advance. jj. -------------------==== Posted via Deja News ====----------------------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Post to Usenet