Database Portability

The database file format was specifically designed to be portable. Portable database files have two attributes:

1. Databases may be created in one environment and freely copied to other environments for use there. For example, a large database of static information may be created in a central office and distributed for use at several branch offices running different types of computers.
2. Databases may be concurrently accessed by applications running on computers with different operating systems or CPU architectures.

Internally this means that the data is not structured on the disk in a form that is not dependent on byte ordering or alignment which varies with different CPU architectures. The result is that moving databases between various CPU architectures can be done with a simple copy. This is extremely useful for preloading database images on a host computer to be deployed on an embedded target device.