Product Documentation

Database Administrator's Guide

Previous Topic

Next Topic

Heterogeneous Server Network Support

The FairCom Server automatically provides sophisticated network support allowing dissimilar machines to share data across the same network. The FairCom term for this type of logic is “Netformat”. Netformat logic automatically controls all aspects of data byte ordering (big endian/little endian). The server process defines the ordering of the data (High/Low "big endian" or Low/High "little endian") while the client process dictates the alignment of the file.

Example

To further illustrate the power of the Netformat logic, review the following network scenario:

  • Server: c-tree IBM POWER 7 TCP/IP Server running AIX
  • Clients: Intel-based Windows word-aligned client application.

All data files will be stored in a High/Low (most significant byte, "big endian") format used by the IBM POWER 7 CPU. Files created by the Intel Windows application will be word aligned (the default with Microsoft Visual Studio compiler). The applications will all be able to share the same files (assuming the application developer has aligned all numeric fields on at least a 2-byte boundary for this example - a good C programming practice).

TOCIndex