Berkeley DB

Selecting a Byte Order

Database files created by Berkeley DB can be created in either little- or big-endian formats. The byte order used for the underlying database is specified by calling the DB→set_lorder function. If no order is selected, the native format of the machine on which the database is created will be used.

Berkeley DB databases are architecture-independent, and any format database can be used on a machine with a different native format. In this case, each page that is read into or written from the cache must be converted to or from the host format, and databases with non-native formats will incur a performance penalty for the run-time conversion.

It is important to note that the Berkeley DB access methods do no data conversion ...