IRI has joined the International Oracle User Group - Americas. The IOUG helps members enhance their skills with technical content, increase the technical advantage of their organization, boost individual marketability, access a peer network for collaboration and information exchange, and voice opinions to Oracle about their products, services and policies. IRI continues to exhibit at IOUG conferences and will leverage its membership to assist in the development and marketing of its Oracle ETL technologies.

TDNett Knowledge, representing Trillium Software in India, is now also an authorized agent for IRI's CoSORT and FAst extraCT (FACT) software. With agents in Mumbai, Delhi and Pune, TDNett supports large companies throughout the region with critical data and content management. Its customers will benefit from the synergy developing between CoSORT's performance hooks (for Informatica, Oracle, DataStage, DB2, etc.) and TDNett's current data quality solutions. 

In México, SysViewSoft specializes in mainframe re-hosting projects, making it an ideal candidate for migrating JCL and other legacy sort users to CoSORT. As SysViewSoft provides conversion services in COBOL, JCL, Natural and Assembler programs to UNIX, the company can also deliver the benefits of CoSORT's SortCL 4GL to client data centers interested in faster, combined data manipulations and RDBMS population.

IRI support engineers can most readily respond to those help requests that contain release, platform and problem details. Please bookmark and use this form when you first need support. Technical content and advanced examples (beyond the manual) for CoSORT are at the support site. Qualified users should contact their IRI agent to obtain access.

CoSORT and other product users can also communicate with IRI and each other through the ITToolbox CoSORT forum, to share job scripts and get helpful solutions to various application challenges or runtime questions.

• 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-calculation on aggregated values and aggregation on cross-calculated values, cross-table joins (matching) integrated with data conversion and expression logic; multinational date 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 plug-n-play replacements or parameter converters for sorting 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 UNIX; and, UNIX SVR4 (/bin/sort).
  
• IRI has begun to offer other data manipulation and management solutions like: FACT for fast unloads from Oracle; netCONVERT for mainframe data conversion and reformatting;  x-PRESS for fast, and secure data compression and decompression; RowGen for custom-formatted random file generation; Logon for controlling and auditing access to UNIX systems; and Permitas for licensing and activating software applications.
  
• 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.

Using Environment Variables in SortCL 

You can use environment variables (EVs) at every level of a CoSORT Sort Control Language (SortCL) job script. Typically, EVs are used to reference input sources and output targets, but they can be used in other ways. 

For example, consider the script below where the input file is an unsorted list of employees (defined by a nested EV), and the total value of the sales they made for each month in the previous calendar year. Here you can use EVs to also create a report that lists only those employees who have earned a reward, based on a minimum sales figure, for a given month that you choose:

/INFILE=$Employees
   /FIELD=(Name, POS=1, SEP=',')
   /FIELD=(Month, POS=2, SEP=',')
   /FIELD=(Sales, POS=3, SEP=',',NUM)
/SORT
   /KEY=(Sales, Descending)
/OUTFILE=Award_Winners
   /INCLUDE WHERE Month == "$req_month"
      AND Sales > $req_amount
   /HEADREC="Top Sellers for $req_month:   
      Sales totaling at least \$$req_amt\n\n"
   /FIELD=(Name, POS=1)
   /FIELD=(Sales, POS=18, SIZE=10.2,        CURRENCY)

On the command line, you can set your choices to produce the report you desire, for example*:

Employees=/usr/emp/$employee_year
req_month=July;export req_month
req_amt=10000;export req_amt

The file Award_Winners might then look something like this when the above script is executed:

Top Sellers for July: Sales totaling at least $10000

Bill Monroe $21,450.00
John Stewart $12,234.40
Betty Johnson $10,095.12

*Depending on your shell, the method for setting environment variables may vary.