Orasort: 5x faster column-sorting with an expired patent from Oracle
deepsystemstuff.com
Orasort: 5x faster column-sorting with an expired patent from Oracle
1–10 of 15 posts
Re: Orasort: 5x faster column-sorting with an expired patent from Oracle
#2It's kind of insane that such an obvious optimization can be patented, I have to imagine that it has been invented independently dozens if not hundreds of times.
Re: Orasort: 5x faster column-sorting with an expired patent from Oracle
#3It's kind of insane that such an obvious optimization can be patented, I have to imagine that it has been invented independently dozens if not hundreds of times.
that article sucks and doesnt describes real algorithm
I think this is inventors blog https://smalldatum.blogspot.com/2026/01/common-prefix-skippi...
Re: Orasort: 5x faster column-sorting with an expired patent from Oracle
#4It's kind of insane that such an obvious optimization can be patented, I have to imagine that it has been invented independently dozens if not hundreds of times.
that article sucks and doesnt describes real algorithm I think this is inventors blog https://smalldatum.blogspot.com/2026/01/common-prefix-skippi...
[+1] this was a good read
Re: Orasort: 5x faster column-sorting with an expired patent from Oracle
#5Re: Orasort: 5x faster column-sorting with an expired patent from Oracle
#6It's kind of insane that such an obvious optimization can be patented, I have to imagine that it has been invented independently dozens if not hundreds of times.
that article sucks and doesnt describes real algorithm I think this is inventors blog https://smalldatum.blogspot.com/2026/01/common-prefix-skippi...
Oh this is much more novel (comparatively), that makes a lot more sense. Kind of an amalgamation of a bunch of optimizations.
Thanks for sharing.
Re: Orasort: 5x faster column-sorting with an expired patent from Oracle
#7>A CPU register is naturally 8 bytes in size
What does naturally even mean here. How is a 64 byte register's (zmm0) size any less natural?
Re: Orasort: 5x faster column-sorting with an expired patent from Oracle
#8First, this article is mostly (AI?) regurgitation. This is much better: https://smalldatum.blogspot.com/2026/01/common-prefix-skippi....
Second, I have independently invented this (quicksort on string prefixes) at my time at CWI, although I didn't end up publishing it, because...
Third, this was already published in the original 1961 Quicksort paper by Hoare: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/files/6226/H2006%20-%20Historic%20Qu.... Near the end, the section on "Multi-word keys" describes a quicksort that partitions on just the first word, and only accesses the next word for the equality partition. And funnily enough this paper credits P. Shackleton for this, thus this idea was thought of even before the Quicksort paper came out.
So as is usual for software patents, this patent never should have been awarded.
Re: Orasort: 5x faster column-sorting with an expired patent from Oracle
#9>A CPU register is naturally 8 bytes in size What does naturally even mean here. How is a 64 byte register's (zmm0) size any less natural?
Or a 7 byte register, if you really want to get freaky.
Re: Orasort: 5x faster column-sorting with an expired patent from Oracle
#10>A CPU register is naturally 8 bytes in size What does naturally even mean here. How is a 64 byte register's (zmm0) size any less natural?
Nothing in this slop means anything particularly, but this detail is extra-wrong considering the variety of processors that the inventor says he used to create this algorithm.