Re: Ontape restore to another server

>Ian Michael Gumby wrote: ><SNIP> > > Remember its not just "integers" but all words would be flipped. > > ><SNIP> > >Careful. No ALL WORDS will be flipped. Intel, unlike some old >little-endian chips (DEC K10/K20 chips most notably) does not flip the >contents of words within a character array. Also, since DECIMAL and it's >derived types in IDS (DATETIME, INTERVAL, etc.) are not native types they >are also not byte flipped. So before you willy-nilly flip every word of >data on the tape you have to process the table schema's for each table. >So, >this is NOT trivial. > Art, There are two issues. 1) Identifying what needs to be flipped, and 2) the actual flipping. The flipping part is *trivial*. The identification may or may not be trivial depending on the ancillary data being provided. (Meanind do you know the data types of columns in the table?) Again, you read in your input page to a buffer and then start the processing part, with the output being the new page. Yes it can be done and no, while not *trivial* the whole project isn't rocket science level either. >Now, could someone update archecker to be able to read cross platform tapes >from a different -endian platform? Sure, it only has to deal with one >table >at a time and 95% of the work's already done. However, making ontape or >onbar do that is a HUGELY different story. > Even though its a different story, its not unrealistic that it can be done. You have to know the page layout. You have to know the data types embedded in the page You have to have some way to track off page references. And of course, you're going to need a lot of disk space. The key is in the use cases for such a tool. Why would anyone want it? And could you justify the cost of ~360K to produce such a beast? One main reason that I say build it, is that it would help in defining the next generation of database backup tools. But hey! What do I know? I haven't seen any of the source code for Ontape, nor have I tried any reverse engineering of an ontape back up. -G _________________________________________________________________ Get live scores and news about your team: Add the Live.com Football Page www.live.com/?addtemplate=football&icid=T001MSN30A0701