Adaptive Server binary and varbinary data is platform-specific; the type of hardware you are using determines how the data is stored and interpreted. Some platforms consider the first byte after the “0x” prefix to be the most significant; others consider the first byte to be the least significant.
The convert function treats Sybase binary data as a string of characters, rather than as numeric information. convert takes no account of byte order significance when converting a binary expression to an integer or an integer expression to a binary value. Because of this, conversion results can vary from one platform to another.
Before converting a binary string to an integer, convert strips it of its “0x” prefix. If the string consists of an odd number of digits, Adaptive Server inserts a leading zero. If the data is too long for the integer type, convert truncates it. If the data is too short, convert adds leading zeros to make it even, and then pads it with zeros on the right.
Suppose you want to convert the string 0x00000100 to an integer. On some platforms, this string represents the number 1; on others, the number 256. Depending on which platform executes the function, convert returns either 1 or 256.
