On Sep 26, 2017, at 11:24 AM, Ron Barnes <rbar...@njdevils.net> wrote: > > I have approximately 600 million records that need to be sorted
Where is the data now? > There are 18 table entries. You mean 18 columns per row, right? > I also need to deduplicate the records based upon the sorted output file. You speak of VB.NET, which means you don’t have a uniq tool as on POSIX systems: https://linux.die.net/man/1/uniq If you can install Cygwin or WSL on these Windows boxes, then you’d have uniq, as well as a cross-platform solution. SQLite is available for both Cygwin and WSL. > I can take care of the deduplication (I think). The basic functionality of uniq is indeed pretty simple: given sorted input, write as output only lines that don’t repeat the content of the previous input line. The primary reason to mess with Cygwin or WSL on Windows is simply because using pre-built tools, you don’t have to debug and maintain it. There’s value in “just run it through uniq.” Even if you can write it in VB.net in half an hour, you’re vastly over-budget compared to the half second it takes me to type “ | uniq”. > Sort Field 1 Ascending > Sort Field 2 Ascending WITHIN field 1 I’m not sure what you mean by “WITHIN”. Are you simply saying that you want the data sorted first by field 2 and then by field 1, so that when two records have the same field 1 content, that the output has that pair of records ordered by field 2? E.g. Field 1 Field 2 ---------- ------------ A B A C As opposed to: Field 1 Field 2 ---------- ------------ A C A B If so, that’s trivial SQL, well-covered in Simon’s reply. _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@mailinglists.sqlite.org http://mailinglists.sqlite.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users