Poul Dige wrote:
Could anybody tell wheter or not it is legal to move a .FDB file between 32 and 64 bit server versions, and different Linux and Windows distributions? I.e. can I move a .FDB file from a win32 server to a Ubuntu 64 bit server with 64 bit Firebird server running on it? (Tests indicate that it is possible...).
Ann W. Harrison answers:
Fortunately, very little in database management has the power of law, except natural laws that some things work and some things don't, and some things appear to work in limited testing and blow up all over when you release them to customers.
Firebird uses native "endian" and alignment characteristics both in memory and on disk. That used to be a big deal when there were dozens of processor families and operating systems that did things differently. (I once worked on a COBOL compiler that had two different integer types, one big-endian, one little endian because the developers guessed wrong about the native behavior of a PDP_11.)
The Firebird developers when to some trouble to insure that 64 and 32 bit servers stored bits on disk exactly the same way, starting with the first official 64 bit releases. So your problem is not with Linux or Windows or 32 or 64 bit architectures, but with endianness and alignment. A 32-bit SPARC running Linux or a 64 bit CRAY running anything is going to require a backup/restore. An Intel almost anything is safe.
But Helen will tell you, and she's right, that back/restore is a better way to move databases than copying them.