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On 21-Jan-2012 21:08 , John Yeung wrote:
It's interesting to see the solutions people come up with, based to a
very large extent on what they are comfortable with. "When all you
have is a hammer, all your problems start looking like nails" and all
that.

I'm as guilty of this as anyone. But trying to look at this as
objectively as possible, assuming Dennis's "Unixy" solution works
(and I think it does), it seems like the quickest and most
straightforward to me.

By the way, this technique has a name: It's the
decorate-sort-undecorate pattern (or idiom). It's very useful, and
can be applied in various ways in various languages.


Or, the problem might just be a nail. Since the OP was not strict in defining their problem\scenario, for lack of a script demonstrating the creation of the "flat file" [STMF, CRTPF, other?] and some sample data, what the scenario looks like to each reader is influenced by their perception of what the writer may only have alluded; their having failed to express very specifically. The OP even failed to suggest where the data needed to be made available; although mentioning the sorting would be a "one time effort", does that necessarily imply that the ordered data must be placed into a similar "flat file", or perhaps just made available to a program is acceptable.?

If the data is already EBCDIC stored in a database physical "flat" file, and because all rows need to be processed for "sort" according to the OP, then the best tool for the job would presumably [and probably generally] be a tool which acts directly on that data rather than requiring copying\moving of the data elsewhere before acting on that data.? Seems that multiple copies [two between EBCDIC and ASCII thus possibly also changing the 0x1C\IFS\"Interchange File Separator" control character to and then from the 0x1A\IS4/FS\"Information Separator Four/File Separator" character] involves a lot of possibly excessive\unnecessary work.?

Besides that, the OP stated that they wanted to avoid their current proposed solution that would "create an intermediate file, with the Last Name as a separate field". And their own solution description which they apparently have chosen to avoid, seems little different than the "Unixy" solution that was proposed.?

So while the likely _implementation_ of the SQL to complete the work would probably be effectively the same as what the OP was thinking to do, the SQL solution sure would look different from their perspective. The data could be selected as just the unconverted field-as-row-data from the file.mbr using a SQL "SELECT * FROM TheFile ORDER BY _Last Name_ " without the result of the ordering expression that defines "Last Name" becoming part of, thus no need to be removed from, any system-generated intermediate copy; i.e. unlike the user-generated intermediate copy proposed solutions.

Regards, Chuck

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