The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Mar. 07, 1995
Filed:
Dec. 23, 1991
Paul K Lee, San Jose, CA (US);
Zvi Y Yehudai, Haifa, IL;
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
In a recursive distributive sort of records according to their key fields, a method for distributing keys to form one or more subgroups and collecting them to preserve or maintain an order among the subgroups. The distribution is accomplished by comparing each key field against an extrinsic attribute and then assigning the key to a subgroup or bucket. The collection sequence preserves the overall key field order. A Dynamic Branching Table (DBT) for governing the ordering of buckets during the collection phase is initially populated with NO-OP instructions. During the distribution phase, a CALL instruction replaces the NO-OP in the sorted order DBT position upon the first occurrence of a distinguishable character in the key character sequence being scanned. An address pointer, pointing to the corresponding bucket, is then inserted in a Bucket Pointer Table (BPT) indexed to the DBT. During the collection phase, the DBT is executed and the empty buckets are skipped by NO-OP execution, while the populated buckets are processed by subroutine CALL execution.