Disk-based algorithms: External merge-sort
Posted on by Samrat Man Singh
I have lately been studying how databases work under the hood. There are many problems that a database has to solve. At the moment, I’ve been having fun exploring how data is stored on disk. Previously, I wrote about how a hashtable is stored on disk. This post is somewhat similar– I talk about how data stored on disk can be sorted. Databases frequently have to sort data of massive sizes, sizes big enough that they don’t fit in memory at once.