IBM Mainframe Forum

Hi,

I was looking for the history of DFSORT, SYNCSORT & ICETOOL (How and when they were developed and released, Team members, Performance comparision, etc.)

However, i did not find satisfying answers to my question.

I just found out that DFSORT was developed by IBM and SYNCSORT by SYNCSORT Inc.

Kindly update with the correct information regarding this!

Thanks in advance!!

Why do you want to do this? You've got two choices: contact the suppliers and ask; do the research yourself. You'll be going back over 40 years.

Stage 1 – OS/360 sort/merge

The sort/merge developed for OS/360 was actually a very good product. It was reasonably fast, and reasonably easy to use. And, like the rest of OS/360, it was “free,” and semi-open source

Stage 2 – Syncsort

Syncsort was very obviously developed from OS/360 sort/merge. It was supposed to be faster.

Stage 3 – DFSORT

DFSORT was IBM's response to Syncsort.

Since then the two products have been in what appears to an unbiased observer a near tit for tat race to improve performance and add features to the point where the products have essentially added the capabilities of a report generator type program.

It is difficult - perhaps impossible - to compare their performance. I suspect that in some environments DFSORT will be a little better, and Syncsort will be a little better in some other environments.