MAXSORT is a maximum capacity sort designed to sort amounts of data that are too large for an ordinary sorting technique to process.
MAXSORT breaks up the sorting process into small, individual sorts. At the end of each individual sort a natural breakpoint occurs. At this time, the sorted data is written out on intermediate storage devices and it becomes possible to stop the program without losing the results of the previous processing. At each breakpoint, an operator may intervene to change program options.
When all the input to the sort has been read and has become individual sorted data sets, this output becomes input to one or more merges. If all the data sets can be merged at once, one final merge is performed. If all the data sets cannot be merged at once, some of them will be combined in one or more intermediate merges. Then, when all the data sets can be merged at one time, the final merge is performed and the final sorted output is produced.
