English

Performance / Price Sort

Databases 2007-05-23 v1 Performance

Abstract

NTsort is an external sort on WindowsNT 5.0. It has minimal functionality but excellent price performance. In particular, running on mail-order hardware it can sort 1.5 GB for a penny. For commercially available sorts, Postman Sort from Robert Ramey Software Development has elapsed time performance comparable to NTsort, while using less processor time. It can sort 1.27 GB for a penny (12.7 million records.) These sorts set new price-performance records. This paper documents this and proposes that the PennySort benchmark be revised to Performance/Price sort: a simple GB/$ sort metric based on a two-pass external sort.

Cite

@article{arxiv.cs/9809004,
  title  = {Performance / Price Sort},
  author = {Jim Gray and Joshua Coates and Chris Nyberg},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/9809004},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

Original word file at: http://research.microsoft.com/~gray/PennySort.doc