Orasort: 5x faster column-sorting with an expired patent from Oracle

orlp•about 1 hour ago

First, this article is mostly (AI?) regurgitation. This is much better: https://smalldatum.blogspot.com/2026/01/common-prefix-skippi....

Second, I have independently invented this (quicksort on string prefixes) at my time at CWI, although I didn't end up publishing it, because...

Third, this was already published in the original 1961 Quicksort paper by Hoare: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/files/6226/H2006%20-%20Historic%20Qu.... Near the end, the section on "Multi-word keys" describes a quicksort that partitions on just the first word, and only accesses the next word for the equality partition. And funnily enough this paper credits P. Shackleton for this, thus this idea was thought of even before the Quicksort paper came out.

So as is usual for software patents, this patent never should have been awarded.

dafelst•about 3 hours ago

It's kind of insane that such an obvious optimization can be patented, I have to imagine that it has been invented independently dozens if not hundreds of times.

rasz•about 2 hours ago

that article sucks and doesnt describes real algorithm

I think this is inventors blog https://smalldatum.blogspot.com/2026/01/common-prefix-skippi...

dafelst•about 2 hours ago

Oh this is much more novel (comparatively), that makes a lot more sense. Kind of an amalgamation of a bunch of optimizations.

Thanks for sharing.

artisin•about 2 hours ago

[+1] this was a good read

galkk•about 1 hour ago

Looks like an AI rewrite of something better.

Validark•about 1 hour ago

Thank you.

For wasting my time.

The only thing someone could learn from this is that CPU registers can be 8 bytes.

beastman82•about 2 hours ago

patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7680791B2

hermitcrab•about 1 hour ago

A vague article.

With one sentence per line.

Most annoying.

charcircuit•about 1 hour ago

>A CPU register is naturally 8 bytes in size

What does naturally even mean here. How is a 64 byte register's (zmm0) size any less natural?

RealityVoid•about 1 hour ago

Or a 7 byte register, if you really want to get freaky.

_3u10•about 1 hour ago

What about 36 bit registers

jeffbee•about 1 hour ago

Nothing in this slop means anything particularly, but this detail is extra-wrong considering the variety of processors that the inventor says he used to create this algorithm.

Orasort: 5x faster column-sorting with an expired patent from Oracle

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