SAS Companion for UNIX Environments

Introduction to Saspsort

CAUTION:: Saspsort is an experimental sort available with Version 8. This sort is not supported by SAS Institute Technical Support and might not be available in future releases of the SAS System.

Version 8 includes an experimental sorting procedure tailored for symmetric multi-processing (SMP) machines. This sort, named saspsort, implements a parallel version of the quick sort algorithm. Saspsort sorts a data set by dividing it up into a number of smaller collections. Each collection can be sorted independently on one of the SMP machine's processors, so the time needed to perform the sort can be greatly reduced.

Saspsort runs best on a platform with multiple processors and an operating system that uses threads. However, depending on the characteristics of the data set being sorted, performance on single-processor machines might also be improved.

If your data set is already roughly ordered on the sort key, the default SAS sort will probably sort the data set faster than saspsort.

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