SortCL's broad reporting capabilities have been extended into  visual business intelligence through a new IRI tool partnership. 

You can direct CoSORT's results to a dynamic iDashboards reporting application simply by specifying /PROCESS=CSV (comma-separated values) format in one or more SortCL outfile targets. The data display in graphical, interactive charts like these:

Click here to see a step-by-step example of how to produce dashboard-ready business intelligence using SortCL. For more in-depth information and a trial, please submit IRI's product information request form and check BI Dashboard Reporting.

Founded in 2004, Proof IT in Riga, Latvia is an Information Technology (IT) consultancy organized in four general areas:
     1) Consultant Support, Business Strategies
     2) Application Installations & Training
     3) Technical Support, Benchmarking & Testing
     4) Product Identification, Database Analysis
With Latvia becoming an independent democratic state in 1991, and joining NATO and the European Union in 2004, Riga has become a regional development hub for commercial and government institutions. Proof IT will use IRI software to deliver faster reorg, reporting, and ETL solutions to this growing market.

Founded in 1993, S&T's 1,800 employees lead the way in providing IT products and services in Central and Eastern Europe. The company develops and implements custom-tailored IT solutions for large and medium-sized telecommunications companies, banks, power utilities, manufacturing companies and public institutions. S&T has subsidiaries in 21 countries, including Turkey -- where CoSORT, FACT and RowGen will be represented.

IRI, Inc. and Israel-based ActiveBase Ltd. are offering to help high- volume Oracle sites collaborate on both data preparation and retrieval performance. You already know how CoSORT tools can perform, speed and combine Oracle-related extract, transform, report, and load operations.

ActiveBase's ActiveKnowledge software uses auto-hints to dramatically improve Oracle SQL response times. The product is based on a Database Network Router™ server infrastructure, centrally installed on the DB or nearby server, and transparent to both applications and databases. ActiveKnowledge applies management, optimization and security policies in real-time on incoming queries to speed SQL operations up to 10X.
       
Both companies realized that with CoSORT on the left [populating the database through faster Oracle-related E, T and L operations] and with ActiveKnowledge on the right [improving the speed and scalability of SQL operations in the database], DW architects and DBAs can collaborate with best-in-class solutions to optimize pre- and post- database population activities.

• 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, plus ELF input and HTML output.
  
• 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, and, UNIX SVR4 (/bin/sort), et al.
  
• IRI has begun to offer other data manipulation and management solutions like: FACT for fast unloads from Oracle; RowGen for custom data generation and format simulations; netCONVERT for mainframe tape data conversion and reformatting; x-PRESS for fast, and secure data compression and decompression; 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 IRI, Inc. Past editions are archived here.
  

To remove or add an Email address in future CoSORT Journal mailings, please email news@iri.com. To contact an IRI agent, click here, call 1-800-333-SORT, or email info@iri.com.

Latest Port of 64-bit Linux CoSORT

CoSORT was recently re-ported to the IBM zSeries mainframe under Novell's SuSE Linux (SLES) 9, in both 31 and 64-bit modes. 

In addition to IRI's support of IBM zSeries Linux flavors, CoSORT is available on 32-bit x86 and 64-bit Itanium platforms, covering: Debian, Mandrake, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Fedora Core, SuSE (Novell SLES), TurboLinux, Asianux, and Gentoo Linux.

CoSORT also runs on FreeBSD, OS/X, Solaris 10 and Linux for IBM's eServer x, i, and p Series, plus of course, all other current, commercially-available UNIX and Windows platforms. Click here for a platform list.

Combine Random and Set File Data

IRI's new RowGen data and file/table/report-format synthesizer allows both randomly-generated data as well as randomly-selected, pre-defined data from 'set' files. Following is a RowGen job script, csv.rcl, that creates a CSV file from both (sets not shown):

/INFILE=in.dat   # SortCL app ID
/INCOLLECT=5     # creates 5 records
/FIELD=(Name,POS=1,SEP=',',SET=names.set)
  # randomly selects from file 
/FIELD=(Passwd,POS=2,SEP=',',ALPHA_DIGIT)
  # randomly generates data of type
/FIELD=(State,POS=3,SEP=',',SET=state.set)
/FIELD=(Zip,POS=4,SIZE=5,SEP=',',DIGIT)
/SORT            # CoSORT engine! 
  /KEY=name
/OUTFILE=stdout  # target=screen
   /PROCESS=CSV  # formats in CSV, 
  # adds a header & frames fields
/MONITOR=0       # run display 'off'

To produce a test CSV file, execute:
rowgen /specification=csv.rcl

The output combines randomly-generated data with randomly-selected data from set files (bold):

Name,Passwd,State,Zip
Betty Pierce,yD486,MD,41716
Bob Jones,N7cC5v,FL,51240
Brad Stevens,Jh3hk5,NY,48128
David Brown,E1PP1,UT,86452
Molly Evans,Xh5X,NV,41395

As RowGen is introduced to the marketplace, basic product functions and recommendations -- like combining these data paradigms -- will be highlighted. As the product matures, more advanced capabilities will be shown as well. Please email your questions to rowgen@iri.com.