ExtraSort is 100% compatible with Sort and usage model is the same. To modify existing package to use ExtraSort instead of Sort, delete the Sort component from the data flow, add ExtraSort, connect paths and finally edit ExtraSort component to specify sort keys. After that, your package should run faster and be able to scale to larger data sets. Please share your feedback concerning performance and robustness of the component. We are happy to consider any feature requests as well.

ExtraSort supports two additional sort orders, strcmp and stricmp. These sort orders are necessary to fullfil requirements of the PennySort benchmark and you may need them for compatibility with sorting programs you may have used in the past. To enable one of these sort orders, right-click ExtraSort component in the data flow and select Show Advanced Editor, activate Input and Output Properties tab and select the input column by which you sort. In the right-hand properties panel, assign value 16 to custom property NewComparisonFlags to get strcmp sort order or value 32 to get stricmp sort order. These sort orders have better performance.

ExtraSort does not support BLOBs, columns with data types DT_IMAGE, DT_TEXT, DT_NTEXT.