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

How Fast Do You Want to Sort Today?

Challenges:

The native Unix sort command is functionally limited and does not perform well (scale) as input volumes increase. Operating system sort verbs cannot:

• sort the largest files efficiently
• handle many data types
• filter, reformat or otherwise transform
• replace legacy sort functions or tools
• meet DW sort, aggregation or join needs

Nevertheless, you're familiar with Unix sort syntax, and may have an investment in jobs or scripts uing /bin/sort commands. You could use a more robust sort engine under the hood on Unix, or the same functionality on Windows.

Solutions:

CoSort packages for Unix, Linux and Windows include a faster, more robust drop-in replacement for the Unix /bin/sort program. You can use the same Unix sort syntax (but with the CoSort engine) on the command line, or in batch jobs, to reorder huge files in parallel. The CoSort engine outperforms the Unix system sort by several orders of magnitude, scales linearly in volume, and does not fail.

For an idea of CoSort's sort peformance, refer to the benchmarks on the right side of this page (under Resources):

Solutions > Data Transformation > Sort/Merge

After seeing dramatic improvements in large file sorting speed, CoSort users move onto a more poweful interface - the Sort Control Language (SortCL) program. SortCL allows you to combine sorting operations with data:

• Transformation (scrub, sort, join, group, etc.)
• Conversion (data types, record layouts, files)
• Protection (field-level encryption, de-ID, etc.)
• Reporting (custom detail, delta and summaries)

as well as legacy sort and data migrations, Oracle unloading, ETL tool acceleration, and some of the related solutions outlined throughout this site like: data validation and scrubbing, pattern matching, complex transforms, etc.