> Indeed a very clever approach, but (and please excuse my ignorance) is
> it a real priority? I mean, Apple have long abandoned their PPC
> hardware so is there a need for it?

That's not only about PPC platform. If you consider SAS, they run on many
big-endian platforms (AIX, SPARC, VMS, etc). Now if client complains about a
bug, he can simply make a copy of the database and SAS support department
does not need those boxes to check the issue - they can access that very
database from their x86 boxes.

So, I'd say big companies that run big-endian platforms might be interested
in the feature.

Roman