CoSort

Sometimes known as the CoSort Company, the company's legal name is Innovative Routines International (IRI), Inc. IRI is a privately held independent software vendor headquartered in Melbourne, Florida. CoSort is IRI's primary product.

IRI provides data manipulation and management software and services for various businesses, industries, and government organizations, including: banking, health care, insurance, and a host of ecommerce and database-related industries.

Software from IRI is used in many high-volume data processing application, and is distributed through more than 35 international offices.

History

IRI was founded as Information Resources, Inc. of New York in 1978. IRI's mainframe sort specialists delivered coroutine sort (CoSort) technology first for the personal computer -- CP/M 80 and 86 in 1980 and MS-DOS in 1982. CoSort was developed on an AT&T 3B2 in 1985, the first release of a commercial sort package for Unix.

In 1995, IRI moved to Melbourne, on Flordia's high technology "Space Coast," and became Innovative Routines International, Inc. The company moved to larger space again in 1996, and announced the release of CoSort for Windows NT, Windows 95, and OS/2 Warp.

In 1997, CoSort became the first Unix sort package to run across SMP CPUs. CoSort version 6.2 sorted a gigabyte in under a minute. Later that year, PC Week declared CoSort to be the leader of the pack in performance and flexibility. As stated by John Shumate for PC Week Labs on August 1, "CoSort's times were at or near the top in all tests... CoSort has the strongest file and data type support, including a rich set of supported COBOL data types... CoSort's ability to handle EBCDIC and packed-decimal data types makes it ideal for integrating mainframe files with NT systems. CoSort also provides strong date-handling features that can be used to convert legacy files for year 2000 compliance..."

In 1999, CoSort 7 introduced integrated join functionality to the sort market, in addition to extensive drill-down aggregation and cross-calculation functionality. Multi-threaded for SMP severs, CoSort 7 also supplied a Java GUI to allow users to read and write SortCL specifications and then execute them locally or remotely on any networked Windows or Unix platforms. In 2000, IRI released its first sort stage plug-in for DataStage.

Version 7.5 was released in 2001 with enhanced internet and international data type support, improved aggregation and reporting features. In 2001, IRI ported CoSort to Intel's 64-bit Itanium platform and IBM eServer iSeries (AS/400) for Linux and OS/400 PASE.

2003 marked IRI's 25th year. CoSort Version 8 was released with more speed; using six SunFire 12K CPUs, it sorted 2.4GB in 39 seconds. With four CPUs on an IBM p690, CoSort sorted 1GB in 12 seconds. The "sortcl_routine" API was introduced, along with clickstream data type and web log metadatasupport, plus markup language formatting in SortCL for web reports. In addition to supporting Linux on Intel x86 and Itanium platforms, CoSort V8 was also ported to IBM's zSeries mainframe eServers and HP-UX on Itanium 2.

In 2004, IRI enhanced both CoSort's transformation performance along with "point solutions" for its cross-platform users. IRI introduced the FAst extraCT (FACT) product to rapidly unload Oracle tables and build metadata for instant ETL flows through SortCL and SQL Loader.

In 2005, IRI released CoSort v8.2.2 and 8.2.3 and put its new test data generator and custom file synthesizer, RowGen, into beta sites. CoSort became Red Hat Ready with ports to RHEL 4, and updated on Solaris 10 on x86 and FreeBSD 5.3.

In 2006, IRI updated CoSort sort plug-ins for IBM's DataStage and Informatica's PowerCenter ETL suites, and partnered with Meta Integration Technology to automatically convert file layouts in ETL and BI tool repositories to SortCL and RowGen data definition files.

IRI introduced CoSort Version 9 in 2007, expanding functionality and services for solution architects, IT managers, compliance officers and application developers. In addition to already-combinable file processing and presentation (manipulation and reporting) functionality, CoSort now protects fields through anonymization, de-identification, encryption, pseudonymization and redaction for sensitive files and reports. RowGen Version 2 was introduced in November at Oracle OpenWorld, to produce intelligent, referentially correct test data in database-table, structured-file, and custom-report formats.

Major Products

1. CoSort Version 9 is a parallel data manipulation and management package for large data volumes. Its primary interface, a 4GL called 'SortCL', can simultaneously transform, convert, protect, and reformat flat and index files for data warehouse integration and staging, legacy sort and data migrations, batch reporting, and privacy (field-level encryption) projects. CoSort also includes a variety of third-party sort replacements and conversion routines to migrate or upgrade sort performance without major impacts on existing operations, plus a GUI, tools for COBOL users, APIs, and metadata converters. A dashboarding option is also available.

2. Fast Extract (FACT) is a parallel table unloading tool for Oracle and DB2 that accelerates data warehouse ETL and database reorgs, migrations, and replications. FACT produces flat files, and creates their metadata for subsequent or simultaneous transformations (in CoSort SortCL) and pre-sorted loads (into Oracle's SQL*Loader). All three tools can run together from a command line for single-pass operations.

3. RowGen is a file synthesis solution for creating safe, referentially-correct test data in the form and format of production tables, files and reports. RowGen uses the language of the CoSort 4GL, SortCL, to support custom transformation and formatting of test files. A GUI added to Version 2, developed by RapidACE, reads DDL models and maps them automatically to RowGen job specification files to facilitate test database population.

All three tools share a common metadata, which is supported by the Meta Integration Model Bridge (MIMB) developed by Meta Integration Technology. CoSort and RowGen users can also use included metadata converters to produce data definitions from COBOL Copybooks, CSV file headers, ELF web logs, and SQL*Loader control files.

Major CoSort customers include American Airlines, Bank of America, Comcast, DoubleClick, EDS, and Fidelity Investments.

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