IRI upgrades its flagship data transformation tool, marking 40 years of innovation

Issued by Global Research Partners for SPI Group
Johannesburg, 02 Jul 2018

SPI, the African distributor for utility software products and services to the open systems segment of the IT industry and the sole Sub-Saharan Africa distributor for USA-based Innovative Routines (IRI), today announced the release of the next generation of the latter's data processing utility, CoSort 10.

First introduced in 1978 and best known as "The Open Systems Standard" in sort software, CoSort is a robust data manipulation package used worldwide for data warehouse ETL and DB load acceleration, BI/analytic data preparation, and legacy sort and data migration. The latest version features dynamic tuning to improve performance, and support for modern data sources, including: JSON files and MongoDB collections, IOT (MQTT) and Kafka, HDFS, HIVE, S3, HTTP/S and S/FTP.

"CoSort is renowned for speed in volume and many data processing industry firsts," commented IRI support director Susan Gegner. "CoSort was the first commercial and parallel sort package for Unix, and the first off the mainframe to aggregate, join, and mask flat-file data, and to simultaneously generate, transform and format test files from scratch. But what remains unique about CoSort," she added, "is its ability to combine multiple data transformations with masking, cleansing, and customised report targets in one job and I/O pass. And now CoSort 10 brings this same level of speed and task consolidation to semi-structured and streaming inputs."

In addition to more data source support, the new CoSort version also includes:

* Fully automatic tuning for sort jobs of any size;
* DB update and delete functions;
* Upgrades to Unicode UTF-8 and UTF-16 data definition and handling;
* Random noise (blurring) and other new PII data masking quality functions;
* Integration with Proximal Systems' Proxy Coupling technology for JCL sort offloads; and,
* Expanded SET file support for lookup, pseudonymisation, and test data operations.

All jobs run on Unix, Linux, and Windows through CoSort's DML and DDL program, SortCL. SortCL is also the foundation of the IRI FieldShield data masking; IRI NextForm data migration and IRI RowGen test data generation products; and, the IRI Voracity data management platform.

For further information, please contact Chris Anderson at tel. +27 11 234 1560; fax +27 11 234 1387; e-mail chris@spi.co.za

IRI, the CoSort Company

Founded in 1978, IRI develops high-performance software for managing and protecting data in legacy migration, DW/BI and development environments. IRI products include Voracity (data discovery, integration, migration, governance, and analytics); CoSort (transformation and reporting); FACT (Fast Extract for VLDBs); NextForm (data and DB conversion); FieldShield and CellShield (data masking); and, RowGen (test data synthesis).

SPI

SPI is a company that provides utility software products and services to the open systems segment of the IT industry. It is the sole Sub-Saharan Africa distributor for USA-based Innovative Routines; USA-based Help/Systems; USA-based Linoma Software; France-based Esker; and, UK-based OpusVL (ex-Xi Software). SPI also develops some of its own software utilities to complement the overseas products that it distributes.

SPI has a wide and varied customer base and includes organisations such as Aspen Pharmacare, Johannesburg Municipality, University of Johannesburg, MMI Holdings, Nampak, National Brands, Stellenbosch University and Unisa.

Editorial contacts