International Business Machines Corporation

Igal Galperin

Zvi Yosef Yehudai

Shmuel Gal

A method is described for operating a computer to sort a set of data records each having an associated key for governing the sort process, the method comprising determining a range for the key values by sampling the key values; defining a plurality of buckets, each bucket corresponding to a respective one of a plurality M of subintervals in the range, and two edge buckets for key values outside the range, each subinterval having a respective index; distributing the keys among the buckets by determining directly from each key value the index of the subinterval into which the key value falls; and processing the buckets in sequence in order to sort the records, sorting the keys in each bucket if the bucket contains more than one key.

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Cambridge, MA, United States of America

Igal Galperin