Co/SORT Product Information

Introduction

Sorting is the engine of information production and COSORT is the open systems standard. As the volume of corporate, financial, scientific, and government data grows, so grows the value of COSORT. The product is used in as many ways as sorting can be used in open systems, but it is primarily known for its open approach to mainframe (legacy) COBOL migrations in UNIX and NT, and its key role in accelerating database utility operations and data warehouse manipulations. COSORT was the first independent sort developed for UNIX (released in 1985 on an AT&T 3B2). Today, COSORT is the world's most widely licensed commercial-grade UNIX sort package.

Product Description

The COSORT package is a collection of routines for file sorting; for one-pass extraction, sorting, summarization, and reporting; and for providing sort functionality within databases, data warehouses and application programs. The central sort engine is a minimal time algorithm exploiting in-memory record transfers. Its unique coroutine architecture puts a more powerful tool in the hands of a more sophisticated user.

COSORT supports all file sizes, record formats, and data types, including: alpha and binary forms, C and COBOL numerics, EBCDIC, zoned decimal, floating point, currency, and multinational timestamps. For non-standard or encrypted data, COSORT supports user exits (special compare procedures). The same is true for non-standard input and output sources and criteria. The usual input and output is from/to new or existing files, tape or optical devices, stdin/stdout, and application programs.

COSORT comes equipped with several standalone end-user utilities. The most popular is its mainframe-based sort control language (sortcl). The sortcl interface uses familiar mainframe sort commands, but in a more intuitive, SQL-based framework, complete with centralized data dictionaries.

COSORT also includes:

• a JCL conversion tool to create sortcl scripts from MVS sort parms

• replacements for PC and UNIX system sort verbs

• a user-friendly interactive and batch interface with online help

• an open API for application development.

The API supports direct C, COBOL, and FORTRAN calls to COSORT's main sort engine either as a subroutine or coroutine. The coroutine is more advanced, however, and has the potential to reduce or eliminate the I/O of intermediate (transfer) files.

For those seeking to balance performance with system needs, COSORT provides innovative resource tuning facilities. Script commands, environment variables and/or control files can be used to tweak various memory and disk parameters. These controls give control back to the system administrator and user. Unlike mainframe-based DBMS tools mapped to open systems, COSORT does not take over the machine by default.

Each COSORT package is customized for use and includes full hardcopy documentation and online man pages. The manual describes each interface in detail, providing easy-to-follow examples and advice. A special COLOR supplement is provided for legacy sort users to run in parallel with COSORT, and the API section shows programmers how to exploit the coroutine in their own language.

COSORT and SMP Systems

On scalar SMP hardware, COSORT drives large sorts across multiple CPUs. This adds a whole new level of performance to VLDB reorgs and reloads and to data warehouse extractions, transformations, and aggregations.

Because performance is the reason for commercial-grade sort software, COSORT's system control facilities cover SMP tuning issues. An expansion to the API for tuning is currently in development.