Sorter Transformation

1. What is a sorter transformation?
Sorter transformation is used to sort the data. You can sort the data either in ascending or descending order according to a specified sort key.

2. Why sorter is an active transformation?
As sorter transformation can suppress the duplicate records in the source, it is called an active transformation.

3. How to improve the performance of a session using sorter transformation?
Sort the data using sorter transformation before passing in to aggregator or joiner transformation. As the data is sorted, the integration service uses the memory to do aggregate and join operations and does not use cache files to process the data.

4. Why is Sorter an Active Transformation?

Ans. When the Sorter transformation is configured to treat output rows as distinct, it assigns all ports as part of the sort key. The Integration Service discards duplicate rows compared during the sort operation. The number of Input Rows will vary as compared with the Output rows and hence it is an Active transformation.

5. How does Sorter handle Case Sensitive sorting?

Ans. The Case Sensitive property determines whether the Integration Service considers case when sorting data. When we enable the Case Sensitive property, the Integration Service sorts uppercase characters higher than lowercase characters.

6. How does Sorter handle NULL values?

Ans. We can configure the way the Sorter transformation treats null values. Enable the property Null Treated Low if we want to treat null values as lower than any other value when it performs the sort operation. Disable this option if we want the Integration Service to treat null values as higher than any other value.

7. How does a Sorter Cache works?

Ans. The Integration Service passes all incoming data into the Sorter Cache before Sorter transformation performs the sort operation.

The Integration Service uses the Sorter Cache Size property to determine the maximum amount of memory it can allocate to perform the sort operation. If it cannot allocate enough memory, the Integration Service fails the session. For best performance, configure Sorter cache size with a value less than or equal to the amount of available physical RAM on the Integration Service machine.

If the amount of incoming data is greater than the amount of Sorter cache size, the Integration Service temporarily stores data in the Sorter transformation work directory. The Integration Service requires disk space of at least twice the amount of incoming data when storing data in the work directory.

8. Why is Sorter an Active Transformation?

This is because we can select the "distinct" option in the sorter property.

When the Sorter transformation is configured to treat output rows as distinct, it assigns all ports as part of the sort key. The Integration Service discards duplicate rows compared during the sort operation. The number of Input Rows will vary as compared with the Output rows and hence it is an Active transformation.

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