Early return of partial sort results in a database system

Abstract

As described herein, a database machine is provided with specialized hardware that can be used to accelerate the sort function. This hardware lowers the computation cost of performing a raw sort operation over the result rows. The hardware may be embodied in a direct circuit (e.g., ASIC), a programmable circuit (e.g., FPGA), a parallel compute engine (e.g., GPU) or any parallel computer. A hardware-assisted sort procedure provides for the early return of up to K results. This early return feature is critically valuable in database operations because often an entire result set is not required. For requests that require only the first L results, when L<=K the query can be satisfied with only a single pass over the data. The hardware- or GPU-assisted sort procedure, referred to herein as 'scraper sort,' may be based on modifications of well-known, existing parallel sort algorithms.