2000-2002
In 2000, DM Review Magazine (now Information Management) cited CoSort #32 in its Top 100 products 'Readership Award' issue as a best product in data management. CoSort Version 7.5 was released in 2001 to provide internet and international data type support, make the CoSort API thread-safe, and improve the aggregation and reporting features in SortCL. In 2002, IRI lead the sort world again by porting CoSort to Intel's 64-bit Itanium platform and IBM eServer iSeries (AS/400) for Linux and OS/400 PASE.
2003-2006
2003 marked IRI's 25th year with another office expansion and a new "V8 Engine" in CoSort. Using just 6 Sun 12K CPUs, CoSort sorted 2.4GB in 39 seconds, and with just 4 CPUs on an IBM p690, CoSort sorted 1GB in 12 seconds, which in those days was very fast! To serve its rapidly growing base of data warehouse architects, CoSort 8 introduced a new API call for the "sortcl_routine", support for click-stream data types and web log metadata, plus markup language formatting in SortCL for web reporting. Support was announced for Linux and HP-UX on Itanium, and for Linux on IBM zSeries mainframes.
In 2004, IRI enhanced both CoSort's transformation performance and its "point solutions" for its cross-platform users. The Fast Extract (FACT) product was introduced to rapidly unload Oracle tables and build metadata for instant ETL flows through CoSort's SortCL (transformation and reporting engine) and SQL*Loader. That year, IRI also "YES!"-certified CoSort for SUSE Linux (SLES) 9 through Novell, and for use on IBM's 64-bit Power5 processor running AIX 5.3.
In 2005, IRI released CoSort v8.2, and a robust test data generator and custom file synthesizer based on SortCL called RowGen. IRI also made CoSort "Red Hat Ready" for Enterprise Linux, and released versions for Solaris 10 on x86, FreeBSD 5.3, and the then latest Unix, Linux and Windows platforms.
In 2006, IRI updated its exclusive sort plug-ins for IBM's DataStage and Informatica's PowerCenter ETL suites, and partnered with Meta Integration Technology to automatically convert file layouts in ETL and BI tool repositories to SortCL and RowGen data definition files. IRI continued to expand its base of resellers and expert consultants around the world, and worked hard to enhance the CoSort, FACT, and RowGen tools.
2007-2009
2007 marked the start of the CoSort Version 9 era and a major expansion of functionality and services for solution architects, IT managers, compliance officers, and application developers. In addition to its already-combined file processing and presentation (transformation and reporting) functions (e.g., change data capture), CoSort's SortCL tool uniquely integrated field-level protections for sensitive files, plus safe test data generation and complex transformations, all into that same job script and I/O pass. Also introduced as unique features were: built-in processing and cross-conversion support for multi-byte data and file types, including Shift-JIS, Big 5, Unicode, ISAM, LDIF, and XML; multi-file joins and dimensional lookups; and, integrated Perl Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) logic.
In 2008, RowGen v2 went into general release for the creation of massive, safe, and intelligent database table and flat-file test sets. IRI also introduced more spin-offs from SortCL, including a powerful data masking and encryption tool for content-aware data loss prevention (DLP) called FieldShield, and a file-format and data-type conversion tool called NextForm.
In 2009, IRI released improvements to FieldShield and NextForm, and began work on another significant upgrade in CoSort functionality and ergonomics.
