| GtkSort |
| Last release 0.3.3 |
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1. Why another sort utility? It's a
long story. I need to sort millions of records every
day for my morning job. Not only me but some of my
co-workers too. What options do I have?
A. To use the standard sort utility of the operating system: That's a joke. Usually the standard sort utility of the operating system is good enough for small data sets and limited to text files only. B. To load the data in a database and select them using the “ORDER BY” SQL clause: That's an option but it's time consuming and not friendly at all for the unexperienced user. Especially if your data come from an outside source and their content and format change very often. C. To buy a commercial sort solution? That's another option but it costs money. On the other hand, the most commercial solutions are actually command line utilities like the standard sort utility of the operating system, or they implement a scripting language and you need to write or edit scripts every time something changes. These utilities are really fast and very rich in features the most of the times, but not user friendly at all. D. To write my own user friendly, GUI based and relatively fast sort utility: That's GtkSort! It's simple, easy, with all the features I need and respectable speed. It's open source and multi-platform. It does not have all the features of a commercial solution and be sure, you won't break any record with this, but it will cover the most of the cases really good. At the end of the day, it is an open source project. If the community needs it and wants to add features or improve the speed, here we are. 2. How can I test it? First of all, read the manual here.
Now if you have data to feed it, go on and play. If you
don't have any data, here is what you can do: Download the gtksortgen
utility. The zip file includes the source code, a win32
executable and a Unix makefile. This utility can
generate up to 2 billion text records. The leading 10
characters of each record is a random key. The following
10 bytes is the record number, counting from 0. The rest
of the record is consisted by eight sets of 10
characters in the form 'AAAAAAAAAA', 'BBBBBBBBBB', etc.
You can use the generated text file to test the
functionality of GtkSort.
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