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

Our Claim to Fame: Large File Sort Performance

Challenges:

Sorting remains a critical component of data processing. Sorting is at the heart of database loading, indexing and searching, data warehouse aggregation, joins, and reporting. Sorting also consumes resources. As file sizes increase from hundreds of megabytes into terabyte levels, sorting can place an exponential demand on computing resources. Sort functions built into DB, ETL and standalone applications, operating systems, and compilers are often unfit for production.

Robustness issues can include:

• sort speed and scalability in volume
• data and file type support
• event monitoring and error handling
• performance tuning and logging
• third-party software and hardware interoperability

Other areas of concern for a commercial sort solution include:

• sorting and other simultaneous functionality
• user interfaces
• sort plug-in or conversion accuracy
• metadata framework
• licensing models
• technical support (speed and availability)
• vendor reputation

Solutions:

As the volume of data grows, so grows the value of CoSort. CoSort offers standalone Unix sort utility, Windows sort utility, and mainframe sort utility operations -- as well as sort API interfaces -- for parallel sort/merge and other data transformation needs. All CoSort UIs run identically across Unix, Linux and Windows servers.

CoSort will sort any number, size, and type of structured fields, keys, records, and files -- including mainframe binary, IP addresses, multi-byte Asian characters, Unicode, and so on. The CoSort engine scales linearly in volume, and lets you tune CPU, memory, disk and related resources. Multiple gigabytes can be sorted in less than a minute on multi-CPU Unix servers.

During sort operations, you can simultaneously perform a wide variety of functions, including: filter, merge, join, aggregate, cross-calculate, convert, de-identify, encrypt, lookup, reformat, re-map, report, validate, and prototype.

With CoSort's Sort Control Language SortCL program, you can combine these functions as you map multiple inputs and formats to multiple output files and formats. The SortCL tool is only one of several interfaces in the CoSort package available for standalone or integrated sort/merge operations. All sorting and tranformation jobs can be scheduled, monitored, logged, and audited.

CoSort also replaces or converts third-party sort functions with proven libraries, tools or services - saving you time and money.