Database Portability

Caché databases are portable across platforms and across versions, with the following caveats:

On different platforms, any file is either big-endian (that is, most-significant byte first) or little-endian (least-significant byte first).
Caché provides a utility to convert the byte order of a Caché database; it is called cvendian. This is useful when moving a database among platforms of the two types. For details, see the section “Using cvendian to Convert Between Big-endian and Little-endian Systems” in Caché Specialized System Tools and Utilities.
If you use a Unicode version of Caché to create a database, you might lose data if you try to use that database with an 8-bit Caché installation, because that installation cannot retrieve 16-bit character data.
You can use an 8-bit database with a Unicode installation, however.
If you use an 8-bit version of Caché, your data is not portable to an 8-bit locale that uses a different character set.
If a database contains code from an earlier release of Caché, you can use that code with a later version of Caché.
In some cases, it is necessary to make changes. InterSystems strives to assure that applications written for a version of Caché will run without change on subsequent versions, but there are exceptions.
If a database contains code or data that was created when long strings were enabled, then you might not be able to use that database with a Caché system in which long strings are not enabled. See the chapter “Server Configuration Options,” later in this book.