Specifications

Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Oracle Solaris Porting Guide

Data Portability

Data Migration Considerations

Data migration is one of the most challenging tasks in the porting process. Data migration activity is

primarily divided into two parts:

• Migration of raw data, which includes migration of application data, schema, tables, indexes,

constraints, and so on.

• Migration of associated infrastructure, which includes migration of stored procedures, database

triggers, SQL queries, functions, and so on.

Data migration is the process of converting data from one format to another, and it is an important

component of any porting effort if data is to be readable on the target system. Data migration can

involve file systems, file content, applications, and database content. Data migration becomes more

challenging when the stored data is in an encoded format or it is in a format that is incompatible with

the receiving system. Fortunately, RHEL and Oracle Solaris use ASCII to store textual data and a

standard text file format.

Many data migration tools and toolkits are available in the market, and there are also many free or paid

support services offered by database vendors for migrations. By using them, enterprises can realize

significant time and cost savings during the migration and testing process.

RHEL and Oracle Solaris 11 provide many common GNU and legacy applications and utilities for

managing data. For example, the GNU tape archive utility (gtar) uses a similar data format and

provides common options in both environments. On Oracle Solaris, you will also find the Oracle

Solaris legacy tar utility which has some different options than the utility on RHEL. For many of the

commands and utilities, you will find more options available on Oracle Solaris than on RHEL. One

reason is that Oracle Solaris has optional, installable packages with GNU utilities bundled in it, and

another reason is that you still have access to legacy Oracle Solaris utilities that provide similar

functionality with minor implementation differences. As a result, developers already familiar with the

RHEL environment will be able to work seamlessly on Oracle Solaris without having to move from

their favorite tools and utilities. This commonality is true for many other applications and utilities, and

it can yield significant benefits during and after the data migration.

Data Portability, Well-Known Issues, and Solutions

File systems are neutral to endianness in general, and swapping files is not an issue between SPARC

and x86/x64 (Intel or AMD) versions of Oracle Solaris. However, applications storing raw data that

needs to be shared across platforms can become an issue.

For example, if an application on the Oracle Solaris OS for SPARC platforms writes the data structures

in a raw format to the files, the data stored in these files would be endian-dependent. Reading from or

writing to these same data files from an Oracle Solaris system that is based on Intel or AMD

processors can create problems regarding the endianness of the data. In short, the binary (raw) data

stored in a file is generally not transferable between SPARC and x86/x64 (Intel or AMD) platforms.