Don't you remember tape sorts? If you have two sets of sorted data, "A" and "B", creating a joined set of sorted data "C" involves only comparing one record each of "A" and "B" to determine which goes first. Then iterate.
You can optimize that by retaining indices for each set of sorted data. So...joining the data is the easy part. Sorting the chunks is still the hard part. :) Regards, Michael B. Smith Consultant and Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com From: Andrew S. Baker [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, August 03, 2010 6:26 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Holy mother of Vlad Tepes... Very nice!! I'd love to see how they managed the sorting algorithm for the "Indy" category when they had to do it with chunks of data, rather than the whole data set at one time. There is only a *little* bit more data here: http://sortbenchmark.org/ ASB (My XeeSM Profile)<http://XeeSM.com/AndrewBaker> Exploiting Technology for Business Advantage... Signature powered by WiseStamp<http://www.wisestamp.com/email-install> On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 12:53 AM, Kurt Buff <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: http://scienceblog.com/36957/data-sorting-world-record-falls-computer-scientists-break-terabyte-sort-barrier-in-60-seconds/ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
