SLES 9 on IBM Power5 Processors
CoSORT is among the first commercial software applications certified on Novell's SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server (SLES) 9 (2.6 kernel) running on IBM's new POWER5 processor. At the IBM benchmark center in Rochester, MN, IRI easily ported CoSORT to both iSeries and pSeries platforms running SLES9. Both similarly-configured 2-CPU POWER5 systems CoSORTed a 711MB input file in just 22 seconds.

CoSORT's FAst extraCT (FACT) unload product for Oracle is now at v1.12 for UNIX, and features a new "FACT Manager" utility to allow you to control and obscure user IDs and passwords for ETL operations.

FACT for Oracle will soon also be available on Windows platforms, as a result of popular demand for CoSORT-Oracle ETL operations on these servers. FACT will also be available for Sybase and DB2, so that you can rapidly extract from more proprietary database sources, and simultaneously create the metadata for SortCL transformations. As with FACT for Oracle, piping into and out of CoSORT helps you rapidly pre-sort (index) and load high volumes of warehouse and reorg data.

IRI has also joined the International Oracle Users Group (IOUG) as a vendor member to support the development and marketing of its ETL solutions around FACT and CoSORT in Oracle environments. 

Featured on the new web site and soon commercially available from IRI will be a series of new software offerings that meet common data and system management challenges, adding value to existing IT operations. In addition to CoSORT's new FAst extraCT and netCONVERT (conversion) and x-PRESS (compression) tools, IRI will offer three new innovative "file management" software products, which will be licensed FREE for the first set of interested reference customers:

Logon - UNIX System Access and Auditing
A UNIX-independent file and system security application from JET Software that controls and reports user activities. Well beyond what UNIX password files can do, Logon Security gives you complete control over -- and audit reports for -- users, stations, and groups. Anyone trying to tamper with Logon's encrypted administration or auditing files can also be sensed, reported, locked out, sent into a special application, etc.

Permitas - Application Software Licensing
A comprehensive, state-of-the-art software licensing and tracking system for independent software vendors (ISVs) and their customers. Easy-to-understand, implement, and use, Permitas prevents piracy while letting you selectively control the location, duration, application, and registration of your Windows and/or UNIX product(s). Your customers can enter license keys themselves, or activate use directly from your (or the Permitas) web server.

RowGen - Custom File / Format Building
IRI's random data generator and custom file-building tool. Using a simple scripting language, you can build as many files -- of any size, format, and data type -- as you need to develop, test, and benchmark your programs, third-party applications, or data center hardware. No other tool gives you this level of speed and flexibility in creating, sharing, and simulating flat files, report formats, and field data (types).

• CoSORT solutions serve data warehouse (ETL) architects, very large database (VLDB) administrators, mainframe sort migrators, and developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) building faster sorting and data transformation into their applications.
  
• CoSORT delivers the IT industry's fastest UNIX sort engine and one of its most powerful flat-file manipulation and reporting programs: SortCL, which combines: row filtering and conditional selection, sort/merge and joins, drill-down aggregation and cross-row calculation, conversion and generation of more than 100 data types, database sequencing, and multi-target, multi-level output reformatting for reports, hand-offs, and DB load utilities
  
• Other special features include: coroutine sort architecture; fully tunable and scalable parallel sort performance on all multi-CPU UNIX and Windows servers; cross-table joins (matching) integrated with data conversion and expression logic; multinational data and timestamp support; a cross-platform Java GUI; and, e-commerce reporting via CSV/CLF and IP Address manipulation, as well as ELF/HTML input/output, respectively.
  
• CoSORT also has parameter conversions and/or (plug-n-play) replacements for the sorts in: ACUCOBOL-GT, Amdocs Ensemble (telecom billing) Ascential DataStage; Informatica PowerCenter and PowerMart; Cincom Supra; IBM's DB2 loader and MVS/VSE sorts; MF COBOL Workbench, Net and Server Express; SAS System; Software AG Natural; Sun MRP, SyncSort; and, UNIX SVR4 (/bin/sort).
  
• IRI also offers related, best-of-breed data manipulation solutions including: FACT for high-speed bulk unloads from Oracle; netCONVERT for mainframe data conversion and reformatting; and, x-PRESS for very large, fast, and secure cross-platform data compression and decompression.
  
• The CoSORT Journal is a quarterly Email newsletter designed to keep subscribers up-to-date on salient news and events at CoSORT/IRI, Inc. Past newsletters are archived for 2 years here.

Copyright © 2004 Innovative Routines International (IRI), Inc. All rights reserved. CoSORT, SortCL, Permitas, and Rowgen are trademarks or registered trademarks of IRI. FACT is a trademark of CoSORT Korea, Ltd. All other company, brand and/or product names mentioned herein are copyrights or registered copyrights of their respective owners.

To remove an Email address from future CoSORT Journal mailings, please email news@iri.com. To subscribe, please provide your contact details here. To contact an IRI agent for assistance, call 1-800-333-SORT, or email cosort@iri.com. To find the IRI agent in your country, click here.

FACT Manager Secures Access to Oracle for Unloads and DW ETL

Later releases of CoSORT's FAst extraCT (FACT) for UNIX have addressed Oracle DBAs' concerns regarding user security through the optional obfuscation of database login and password information. 

FACT's new "FACT Manager" program is a menu-driven command-line interface that handles user accounts.

FACT requires that all users have 'connect' and 'select' access to the Oracle tables from which they are extracting. The userid and password of the FACT user can be specified explicitly within the FACT .ini (initialization) file that contains all the specifications of the unload.

However, for security purposes, these Oracle login details can be hidden from view from the FACT user. The .ini file can instead reference an encrypted data file that stores this information.

To perform the encryption, your Oracle DBA can use the provided FACT Manager program to create and manage the login details of up to 128 distinct FACT users, all with the necessary privileges to connect to, and extract from, Oracle tables within a given database instance. Once created and stored by FACT Manger, user details can be obscured within the FACT .ini file, so for example, the required connectivity-related entries can appear as follows:

USERID=FACT_MANAGER
PASSWORD=alias

where alias is the alias name created when adding a user with FACT Manager.

rather than, for example:

USERID=scott
PASSWORD=tiger

FACT Manager's user-friendly interface allows you to add (and specify a unique alias), list, or delete users, and to search for users using various search criteria.

For more information on CoSORT's FACT software, click here or send email to fact@cosort.com.