Another approach might be to read chunks of your very large database, perhaps 100k to 500k records at a time, and sort each chunk into its own temporary file. Once you have read and sorted all of the data, do a sort/merge of the temporary files into a final sorted file. My gut feeling is that this would be more efficient than the "two at a time" approach you are taking.

Cheers,

JohnGG

In reply to Re^3: Sorting Numbers & Text by johngg
in thread Sorting Numbers & Text by PriNet

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