Introduction to Technical Paper Presentation on External Sorting:
The paper is about the implementation of the external sorting. In general method of sorting, the file which is to be sorted will be first loaded into memory and they sorting of data is done in memory and then output is written. But when we consider the method of external sorting, the data is not loaded in the memory and this can be due to lack of memory resources.
External sorting is defined as the sorting of file which is on either disk or tape. It can also be called as the tape sorting. The method of tape sorting involves two phases of distribution phase and merge phase.
When we consider the distribution phase, the strings are creating by using the internal sorting technique and can be generated one at a time and these strings are distributed based on rule of several tape. If we consider the merge process the strings are merged together to form a longer string and these strings are merged again. The process is continued till the final merge is obtained and the single string is considered as the required sorted file.
When we deal with the merging process the strings which are to be merged is named as the input strings and the one that is generated after merging is called as output string. The advantages when we deal with the merge sort are allows sequential access of records, provides the stable sort and also minimizes the access of the block.
We can conclude that when the data set is too large for the internal sorting to store data in memory then we use the external sorting algorithm.
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