To transport a tablespace from one platform to another, datafiles on different platforms must be in the same endian format (byte ordering).

The pattern for byte ordering in native types is called endianness. There are only two main patterns, big endian and little endian. Big endian means the most significant byte comes first, and little endian means the least significant byte comes first. If the source platform and the target platform are of different endianness, then an additional step must be taken on either the source or target platform to convert the tablespace being transported to the target format. If they are of the same endianness, then no conversion is necessary and tablespaces can be transported as if they were on the same platform.

Be aware of the following limitations as you plan for transportable tablespace use:

• The source and target database must use the same character set and national character set.
• You cannot transport a tablespace to a target database in which a tablespace with the same name already exists. However, you can rename either the tablespace to be transported or the destination tablespace before the transport operation.
• The set should be self-containing

You do not need to convert the datafile to transport a tablespace from an AIX-based platform to a Sun platform, since both platforms use a big endian.

However, to transport a tablespace from a Sun platform (big endian) to a Linux platform (little endian), you need to use the CONVERT command in the RMAN utility to convert the byte ordering. This can be done on either the source platform or the target platform.