Oracle RMAN big-endian to little-endian
I have an Oracle RMAN backup that was created on a Solaris SPARC box and is therefore in big-endian format. I wish to restore this backup to a Windows x86-64 based machine but have hit a roadblock due to the endianness issue.
I have read on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Endianness_in_files_and_byte_swap that it's not possible to do a generic conversion of the endianness of a file as the legnth of the variables stored in the binary file are not known, which I can understand.
I have discovered that RMAN will convert the endianness of datafiles or tablespaces using the CONVERT command, however to get this far I have to have the datafiles in place which means restoring from the control file has to have already taken place (which is in big-endian so can't even do that). The following seems to suggest that it's not possible http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2008/08/rman-06172-no-autobackup-found.html and that I must have the control file in the correct endian to begin with.
I know that I can import the above RMAN backup onto a Solaris SPARC machine then do an exp/imp process but I'm really interested in getting a one-machine restore process in place.
Can anyone suggest a route to achieve what I'm looking for? - which is; a big-endian RMAN backup from a Solaris SPARC system restored to a little-endian Win32 x86-64 platform?
Answer
Check out chapter 15, "RMAN Cross-Platform Transportable Databases and Tablespaces", of the Oracle® Database Backup and Recovery Advanced User's Guide.
It appears CONVERT is the tool you are looking for, but you need to use it in conjunction with transportable tablespaces.