Sorting with COBOL FASTSRT

With the COBOL program for sorting records in Figure 1, the input (from MASTER-FILE) and the output (to SORTED-MASTER-FILE) qualify for the COBOL FASTSRT option. With this compile-time FASTSRT option, your sort runs considerably faster, because DFSORT does the input and output processing, rather than COBOL. For complete details on FASTSRT, refer to z/OS DFSORT Application Programming Guide and the COBOL Programmer's Guide that describes the compiler version available at your site.

Note: COBOL evaluates sort input and output independently to see if it qualifies for FASTSRT. If either the input or the output of your sort does not qualify because of the presence of an input or output procedure, you might be able to replace such a procedure and use DFSORT control statements to accomplish the same thing. For example, you can use a control statement (OUTREC) to indicate how records will be reformatted before being written to the output data set.