Firebird not experimental

[Lionel Élie Mamane]

On Wed, Aug 28, 2024 at 11:32:20AM +0200, Alexander Thurgood wrote:

> - the embedded HSQLDB is platform agnostic (...)

> My understanding was that the same is not guaranteed for embedded FB
> due to the endian-(n/m)ess of the architectures.

It was not before August 2016, when we were using the Firebird on-disk
format.

> Does the use of the backup format take this into account? In other
> words, if I prepare an embedded FB ODB file on macOS Arm and send it
> to someone on Windows x86_64, will it be
> readable/exploitable/modifiable ?

Yes, that is the main point of the backup format, see
http://dfp.firebirdsql.org/file/documentation/reference_manuals/user_manuals/html/gbak-backup.html

  The dump file created by a default gbak backup is cross platform
  (transportable) so a backup taken on a Windows server can be used to
  recreate the same database on a Linux server, or on any other
  platform supported by Firebird. This is not true of the copies of
  your database taken (while the database was closed!) with tools such
  as Winzip etc. Those copies should only ever be used to restore a
  database on the same platform as the one copied.

--
Lionel