Santa,
the files from a big-endian OS are incompatible with a little-endian OS. You
may succeed going from one to another, perhaps windows 32 to 64 bit, but success is not guaranteed.
The only sure-fire method is to make a transportable tablespace.
provides details, with an excerpt below.
About Transporting Tablespaces Across Platforms
Starting with Oracle Database 11g, you can transport tablespaces across platforms. This functionality can be used to:
*
Allow a database to be migrated from one platform to another
*
Provide an easier and more efficient means for content providers to publish structured data and distribute it to customers running Oracle Database on different platforms
*
Simplify the distribution of data from a data warehouse environment to data marts, which are often running on smaller platforms
*
Enable the sharing of read-only tablespaces between Oracle Database installations on different operating systems or platforms, assuming that your storage system is accessible from those platforms and the platforms all have the same endianness, as described in the sections that follow
Many, but not all, platforms are supported for cross-platform tablespace transport. You can query the V$TRANSPORTABLE_PLATFORM view to see the platforms that are supported, and to determine each platform's endian format (byte ordering). The following query displays the platforms that support cross-platform tablespace transport:
SQL> COLUMN PLATFORM_NAME FORMAT A32
SQL> SELECT * FROM V$TRANSPORTABLE_PLATFORM;
PLATFORM_ID PLATFORM_NAME ENDIAN_FORMAT
----------- -------------------------------- --------------
1 Solaris[tm] OE (32-bit) Big
2 Solaris[tm] OE (64-bit) Big
7 Microsoft Windows IA (32-bit) Little
10 Linux IA (32-bit) Little
6 AIX-Based Systems (64-bit) Big
3 HP-UX (64-bit) Big
5 HP Tru64 UNIX Little
4 HP-UX IA (64-bit) Big
11 Linux IA (64-bit) Little
15 HP Open VMS Little
8 Microsoft Windows IA (64-bit) Little
9 IBM zSeries Based Linux Big
13 Linux 64-bit for AMD Little
16 Apple Mac OS Big
12 Microsoft Windows 64-bit for AMD Little
17 Solaris Operating System (x86) Little
16 rows selected.
If the source platform and the target platform are of different endianness, then an additional step must be done 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.
Before a tablespace can be transported to a different platform, the datafile header must identify the platform to which it belongs. In an Oracle Database with compatibility set to 10.0.0 or later, you can accomplish this by making the datafile read/write at least once.
Regards
T