Timeline for Is Postgres's on-disk data format compatible between CPU architectures?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
8 events
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| Oct 2, 2023 at 7:06 | answer | added | Phill W. | timeline score: -1 | |
| Oct 2, 2023 at 3:05 | comment | added | Vérace | Hi, and welcome to dba.se! SQLite specifically guarantees that it will work across platforms. PostgreSQL does not make any such guarantee! Failing that, it would be a brave man or woman who would risk their data on such a wish and a prayer! You could try asking this on the pg-hackers mailing list, but I'd bet my paycheques from now till Christmas that the answer will be no! Best of luck... | |
| Oct 2, 2023 at 2:32 | comment | added | Laurenz Albe | I second Erwin's doubt, and I would certainly not risk it with data that are important to me. In addition, as mentioned, the version of glibc (or libicu, whatever is in use) must be identical on both systems. | |
| Oct 1, 2023 at 20:35 | comment | added | Erwin Brandstetter | I know the data directory is not portable between Windows and Linux. See: dba.stackexchange.com/a/98245/3684 But I don't know if it could be portable between two instances with the same OS (they can never be exactly the same), but different CPU architectures. I certainly would not try with different OS versions, or different Postgres versions (like you found yourself already). | |
| Oct 1, 2023 at 20:16 | comment | added | Danya02 | @ErwinBrandstetter It turns out that my container actually did run on the wrong architecture for a bit, and a couple rows that were there survived this. But I would like to have some more confirmation before I put production data through that. What I'm interested in is, are there any particular portability guarantees made with regards to this format, like there are with SQLite. | |
| Oct 1, 2023 at 19:24 | comment | added | Erwin Brandstetter | ARM and x86 / AMD64 share "little-endianness", so at least numbers should basically agree. But I am not sure whether all file formats agree as well. And there are more possible complications. Postgres can rely on OS libraries for encoding and locale information, with possible ramifications on physical storage and index sort order. And I doubt that OS versions for ARM and AMD64 will always be in perfect sync. I am not sure if it's possible, but I am very skeptical. | |
| S Oct 1, 2023 at 18:28 | review | First questions | |||
| Oct 1, 2023 at 22:41 | |||||
| S Oct 1, 2023 at 18:28 | history | asked | Danya02 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |