Innovative Routines International (IRI), Inc., The CoSort Company

Improving Native SAS Sort Performance with CoSort

Challenge:

Native PROC Sort performance in SAS v7-9 for Unix is not as fast or impact-neutral as you may want it to be for some very large data sets. You may not wish to use or license the default sort options SAS provides with their base Unix or Windows systems for performance or cost reasons.

Solution:

CoSort appendages exist in SAS v7 and 8 to replace the SAS sort procedure on Unix systems with minimal installation and implementation issues. Sort performance can improve up to 6X in volume.

For some reason, SAS has unfortunately not yet responded to multiple requests to include the CoSort appendage in SAS 9.1.x. At this time, however, SAS is requesting specifically that you use this link to provide your written request to re-enable the affordable, high-performance CoSort sorting and file transformation engine option in the SAS environment:

http://support.sas.com/ctx/supportform/index.jsp

Please be sure to state the aforementioned reasons for wanting a direct CoSort hook, and contact your SAS representatives personally to receive a follow-up implementation estimate.