FastSort Manual

Using FastSort System Procedures
FastSort Manual—429834-003
5-27
SORTMERGESTART Procedure
If you do not specify subsort-count, then scratch-file-name is the initial
scratch file for a serial sort or merge run. If you omit scratch-file-name or it
equals all blanks, SORTPROG creates a scratch file on a suitable volume. You
cannot omit or use blanks for a subsort scratch-file-name. For more
information about scracth files, see Table 5-4 on page 5-32.
scratch-block input
INT:value
is the size, in bytes, of input and output blocks for SORTPROG scratch files. The
scratch-block value can be any multiple of 2048 up to 56 KB. The value must
be large enough to accept the largest input record, rounded up to the nearest even
byte, plus 14 bytes of overhead.
If you omit scratch-block or specify –1, the default value for scratch-block,
SORTPROG uses the default scratch block size of 56 KB.
For parallel sorting, specify scratch-block only for the distributor-collector
process. The subsort processes use the same block size as the distributor-
collector.
process-start input
INT:ref:*
specifies the parameters for starting each SORTPROG process.
For serial sorting, process-start uses only the first four words of the
NEWPROCESS structure.
For parallel sorting, process-start must use the 29-word expanded
NEWPROCESS structure and include an entry for each process, starting with the
distributor-collector. You must set flags.<6> to 1 to use the 29-word expanded
NEWPROCESS structure. Table 5-2
on page 5-28 describes the layout of this
structure.