Data migration is necessary when an organization decides to use a new computing system or database management system that is incompatible with the current system. Typically, data migration is performed by a set of customized programs or scripts that automatically transfer the data.
Data migration can involve movement of data in file systems, files, applications, and databases. Some stored data might be in an encoded format or in a format that is incompatible with the receiving system. Note that both, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Oracle Solaris use ASCII to store text data.
Migrating data involves the following activities:
Migration of raw data including migration of application data, schema, tables, indexes, and constraints
Migration of associated infrastructure such as stored procedures, database triggers, SQL queries, and functions
Endianness can be an issue when migrating data because the binary (raw) data stored in a file is usually not transferable between SPARC and x86/x64 platforms.
Applications storing data that is shared between platforms can handle endianness issues in one of the following two ways:
Storing data in an application-defined, endian-neutral format by using text files and strings
Choosing either the big-endian or little-endian convention and perform byte swapping by using enabling technology such as XDR