Orasort: 5x faster column-sorting with an expired patent from Oracle

https://deepsystemstuff.com/how-oracles-secret-column-sorting-technique-became-public-after-its-patent-expired-making-sorting-5x-faster/

by theanonymousone • 16 days ago

28 14 16 days ago

deepsystemstuff.com

dafelst2• 16 days ago

It'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.

rasz• 16 days ago

that article sucks and doesnt describes real algorithm

I think this is inventors blog https://smalldatum.blogspot.com/2026/01/common-prefix-skippi...

artisin• 16 days ago

[+1] this was a good read

dafelst2• 16 days ago

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.

beastman82• 16 days ago

patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7680791B2

charcircuit• 16 days ago

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?

RealityVoid• 16 days ago

Or a 7 byte register, if you really want to get freaky.

_3u10• 16 days ago

What about 36 bit registers

jeffbee• 16 days ago

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.

orlp• 16 days ago

First, 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.

hermitcrab• 16 days ago

A vague article.

With one sentence per line.

Most annoying.

Validark• 16 days ago

Thank you.

For wasting my time.

The only thing someone could learn from this is that CPU registers can be 8 bytes.

galkk• 16 days ago

Looks like an AI rewrite of something better.

ranger_danger• 16 days ago

A CPU register is naturally 8 bytes in size, and if Oracle extracts 8 bytes from two strings for comparison, then the comparison requires fewer registers and fewer CPU cycles.

Isn't this just a typical SIMD optimization that tons of projects use?

Orasort: 5x faster column-sorting with an expired patent from Oracle

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