The rebound sorter: an efficient sort engine for large files

Sorting plays an increasingly important role in determining the overall performance of data base systems. Described is a new sorting scheme, called the rebound sort, implementable on a variety of technologies, e.g., magnetic bubbles and charge-coupled devices. The sort engine based on this new sorting scheme accepts as input a sequence of records, sorts them, and outputs the sorted records automatically. The actual sorting time is completely overlapped with the input/output time.