Syncsort Technology Ltd has announced Syncsort OS Release 3.4, its MVS sort utility and competitive offering to IBM’s DFSORT 11.1, and the company says that that central processing time is reduced by 22% and Executive Channel Programs, EXCPs, by 37% when compared with Release 3.3. SyncSort is claiming 50% improvements for applications that use fixed and variable length data sets and VSAM data sets. The company’s Maxsort facility, which enables the sorting of large data sets by using tape units for additional immediate storage is also said to be improved by 50%. Other features that have been enhanced include Dynalloc and Dynamic Storage Management. The first allocates sort work space to ensure optimal use of work space, and in Release 3.4, SynSort OS automatically retries any Dynalloc operation that fails because of lack of space. The number of attempts and and amount of time between attempts may be set by the user. In the case of Dynamic Storage, the algorithm has been improved to reduce the amount of virtual storage used for small sorts. SyncSort says it has added an option that converts variable length output records to fixed length ones automatically. Other facilities include multiple output for creating different data sets on different devices; Sortwriter for full data editing by record selection, reformatting and summarisation; On Line Syncsort for menu driven sort control statement and JCL generator for optimising existing and new sort, merging and copying applications and to reduce coding and testing times.
