Innovative Routines International (IRI), Inc., The CoSort Company

Do You Need to Compare or Join Files Quickly?

Challenges:

It can take a long time to join large tables. Sometimes a database or ETL tool may not be the most efficient place to perform large scale data integration (unification). Similarly, homegrown 3GL programs design to bring data together may also be slow or difficult to maintain.

You may also need a faster and easier way to compare two or more files over one or more fields, and identify the changes that have occurred (inserts, updates, deletes) since a given point in time. In other words, you need to rapidly integrate large sources of data, and/or report on the changes in your transaction files.

Solutions:

Have you considered off-loading these operations to a 'less busy' environment like the file system or another machine?

Using the Sort Control Language (SortCL) tool in IRI's CoSort package, you can simultaneously filter, sort, join, and reformat multiple files. In the same job script and pass, you can also cross-calculate and derive new values and from matched results. For output, you can customize multiple detail and summary report targets, and hand-off selected file segments in many formats for other tools.

The CoSort SortCL tool supports inner and outer join functionality to produce combined outputs and file compares based on specified conditions. One or more pre-sorted or unsorted files in fixed or variable-position formats can be input, joined, and output.

SortCL can also eliminate inner join results from an outer join, eliminate and reformat null records, and again, continue to manipulate and reformat the resulting data in the same job script and I/O pass. This allows you to combine multi-table joins with sorting, aggregation, and reporting and leverage CoSort's powerful data protection and prototyping functionality -- again, all at the same time.

The bottom line? CoSort V9's SortCL tool continues to deliver innovative flat-file join solutions that allow you to compare files, capture changed data, produce business intelligence, and reduce your database query and refresh overhead.