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The CoSort Journal Q2'08 IRI Newsletter Sorting, ETL, Reporting, Data Protection IRI, The CoSort Company, Turns 30 Software Innovations for 'Big Data' Continue The capability and efficiency of computers have increased exponentially since the 1970s. Back then, COBOL and mainframes were de riguer, and the modern PC was little more than a vision in an engineer’s mind. A related vision was realized in June, 1978 when a Burroughs sort expert founded IRI, The CoSort Company, in Manhasset, New York. Two years later, Paul Friedland released a commercial sort program using a coroutine algorithm -- first on CP/M and DOS, and then in 1985, for UNIX. "The rest is history": http://www.cosort.com/company/history The streaming nature of its coroutine logic and the extensibility of its user interface make CoSort a powerful and logical vehicle for: mainframe sort migrations, ETL and BI acceleration, change data capture, report generation, and field-level protection. CoSort also bridges easily to third-party products and valuable point solution spin-offs. For more information and perspective, please listen to the BI Network interview with IRI Business Development VP David Friedland: June 2008 Solution Spotlight on IRI, The CoSort Company Looking ahead, you can expect further innovations from IRI's rich mix of high-performance data manipulation technologies, open metadata, and partner collaborations. These innovations often accommodate user requests, and we always welcome them. To speak your mind, please visit: http://www.cosort.com/customers/feedback Valuable submissions are entered into our drawing for a new 3G iPhone 2! Everyone at IRI USA and its resale offices around the world thank you for your support and collaboration. We are grateful for our many technical accomplishments and business associations, and look forward to the next 30 years of steady growth. New, On-Line CoSort Networking Connect to Other Users, IRI, and Peers at ITtoolbox ITtoolbox is an on-line community of IT users and developers sharing their experience and advice. Access is free, and you can search and contribute to a worldwide collective of application knowledge. ITtoolbox delivers and grows this body of information through collaboration techniques and publishing tools such as discussion groups, blogs, wiki’s, knowledge bases, and professional networking IRI is now an ITtoolbox sponsor, and has set up an information and connection page for our users and other community members interested in learning about CoSort and connecting with IRI and its community: http://vendors.ittoolbox.com/profiles/cosort-data-management On this page, you can view current press releases and white papers, message and comment boards, and make contributions to the network blogs. If you do not already have free access to ITtoolbox, please click here to register: Once you have an ID, click here to join the CoSort community at ITtoolbox! Coming Soon: NextForm Converts File Formats and Data Types IRI’s newest product, NextForm, is a data migration utility for converting file and data types. Using the same data definition (field layouts) as CoSort's SortCL tool, NextForm allows you to remap flat-file structures and field layouts, translate between more than 100 data types at the field level, and produce multiple target files. NextForm will support large files in flat-XML, LDIF, CSV, MF-ISAM, text, and other sequential formats, but is limited to one CPU on Windows machines at its initial low entry price point. It is designed for those sites which do not need the parallel sorting, transformation, protection, or reporting capabilities of SortCL. NextForm is instead designed, for example, to simply convert fields from EBCDIC to ASCII, or files from LDIF to CSV. For more information on NextForm, please email info@iri.com. IRI Joins the Mainframe Migration Alliance CoSort Moves Critical Jobs to WIndows, too. The Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA) is a group of companies that migrate workloads off of the mainframe and modernize them on Microsoft platforms. The benefits of migrating include the relative agility, supportability, and cost savings of running applications in a Windows environment instead. While the MMA is relatively new, IRI has been re-writing mainframe sort applications for Windows (and of course Unix and Linux) for many years. To contribute to MMA's more holistic approach to legacy modernizations, IRI has joined as a member company. See the IRI entry under the Software Solutions link at: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/mainframe/partners.mspx IRI anticipates that its participation in the MMA will drive both awareness of CoSort and collaborations with other partners whenever there is a need for JCL sort/sum/select migration, COBOL data conversion, or (RowGen for) test data generation. BI Network Vision Award for CoSort Users Submission Deadline is July 15, 2008 The Business Intelligence Network™ is an on-line resource for business intelligence and data warehousing professionals that offers industry news coverage and podcasts, expert articles and blogs, channels for vertical industries, and vendor contributions. The BI Network recently introduced a new "Vision Award for Business Impact" designed to "recognize the efforts of successful companies who have used software and technology to positively impact their organizations." Despite the late notice, we invite you to apply for an award that can elevate the awareness of your company and CoSort in the industry. Can you define the business impact in performance or financial terms of using CoSort for Data Integration (including legacy migration, ETL acceleration, or CDI)? If so, IRI feels that the showcasing opportunity, if not an actual award, is worth the brief time it takes to describe your experience. Please follow the link below to submit a case study that will highlight our collaborative success in production: http://www.b-eye-network.com/visionaward Tech Tip: File Format Conversion Changing LDIF into CSV The following file-format conversion example applies to both CoSort SortCL and NextForm (new) users. Consider this input data excerpt from the file plant_catalog.ldif: common: Phlox, WoodlandAnd so on … A simple sortcl script is used to convert and sort the data is follows: /INFILE=plant_catalog.ldif /PROCESS=LDIF # identify input file format /FIELD=(common, POS=1,SEP='|') # use separator attributes /FIELD=(botanical, POS=2,SEP='|') /FIELD=(zone, POS=3,SEP='|') /FIELD=(light, POS=4,SEP='|') /FIELD=(price, POS=5,SEP='|',CURRENCY) /FIELD=(availability, POS=6,SEP='|',AMERICAN_DATE) /SORT /KEY=common # sort over the 'common' field /OUTFILE=plant_catalog.csv /PROCESS=CSV # specify output file format /FIELD=(common, POS=1, SEP=',') /FIELD=(botanical, POS=2, SEP=',') /FIELD=(zone, POS=3, SEP=',') /FIELD=(light, POS=4, SEP=',') /FIELD=(price, POS=5, SEP=',', CURRENCY) /FIELD=(availability, POS=6, SEP=',',AMERICAN_DATE) After running this job through SortCL, the CSV output file, plant_catalog.csv, looks like this. common,botanical,zone,light,price,availabilityand can be readily imported into Excel and similar applications. Note that the same job run in NextForm would not recognize the /SORT syntax and simply preserve the original record order of the input. |