Patent ID: 8271504

Claim:
A system for ordering data, comprising: (a) a central processing unit; (b) memory accessible to the central processing unit; (c) at least one external storage device whose contents are made accessible to processes running on the central processing unit through a directory structure; (d) processing logic to investigate the contents of an input file stored in the at least one data storage device and to identify presorted portions thereof; (e) processing logic to incorporate the identified presorted portions of the input file into a second file in the at least one data storage device, wherein the second file is regarded as a sortwork file in a sort merge process, by rearranging information in the directory structure so as to incorporate in the second file the presorted portions of the input file without physically transferring the presorted portions from the input file; and processing logic to merge the data contained in sorted blocks of data within the sortwork file to a post-merge output file containing the fully sorted data resulting from the sort merge process, the processing logic to perform said merging further comprising additional processing logic to incorporate the blocks of sorted data into the post-merge output file by rearranging information in the directory structure and without physically transferring the sorted blocks to the post-merge output file.