On Tue, 07 Dec 2004 12:27:33 -0800, Paul wrote: > I have a large database of 15GB, consisting of 10^8 entries of > approximately 100 bytes each. I devised a relatively simple key map on > my database, and I would like to order the database with respect to the > key.
You won't be able to load this into memory on a 32-bit machine, even with loads of swap. Maybe you could do this on x86-64 with lots of swap (or loadsa memory), or other 64-bit hardware. It will be _really_ slow, however. Otherwise you could do an on-disk sort (not too hard with fixed-length records), but this will require some coding. You'll probably need to do some reading to work out which sorting algorithm accesses the data less randomly. I think the key phrase is an "external sort" rather than an "interal sort". It's probably easiest to load it into the thing into a database (like PostgreSQL), to do the work for you. Jeremy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
