TECH_178: Effective Sorting - Putting Things in Order

Project and Program: Performance and Capacity Management

Tags: Proceedings, SHARE Orlando 2026, 2026

Possibly the most frequently executed program in any large-scale system is the sort. For many applications, data has no value unless it is sorted. Large-scale sorts can involve millions of records and have a significant impact on overall system throughput. But there's more to sorting than just performance. Modern sort utilities include extraordinarily wide-ranging functions for manipulating data - selecting, reformatting, rearranging, and reporting. An experienced user can leverage these capabilities to provide sophisticated data management and detailed multi-level reports, and often eliminate the need for multiple passes over the input data. In this session, we'll discuss sort basics, best practices for achieving optimal performance, and the wealth of different operations that can be performed with sort control statements.

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