Marketed in Brasil by PHD Brasil, Syncsort's newest release of SyncSort for z/OS offers new capabilities for exploiting the latest features of the z/OS operating system and z9™ processors. With this release, users will achieve substantial reductions in elapsed time and CPU time through SyncSort's ability to offload certain sort processes to a zIIP processor and SyncSort's effective use of the z9's™ MIDAW facility. In addition, new data utility features improve productivity.

The new features and functionality of release 1.3 are the result of Syncsort's continuing focus on producing high-performance software. Responding to evolving architectures and new information processing requirements, PHD Brasil´s customers will experience significant productivity and performance benefits."

Performance Improvements

SyncSort for z/OS Release 1.3 is up to 25% faster than the previous release. These performance gains derive from exploitation of the z9's™ MIDAW I/O technology - reducing channel, director, and control unit overhead - and the System z9™ Integrated Information Processor (zIIP), both of which are available on IBM System z9™ Enterprise Class (z9-109) and IBM System z9™ Business Class processors.
Performance advances, such as enhanced memory management techniques and the use of memory objects with more applications, also result in elapsed time savings for a wide variety of applications. Early release of pages backing a memory object provides benefits to the overall system by freeing the central storage resource at the earliest

possible point.

Enhanced Data Utility Features

Many new features - designed to improve productivity and development time - make their appearance in SyncSort for z/OS Release 1.3. These features include:

• 
  Enhanced processing of fields in equally-keyed records including MIN, MAX, and AVG functions available on the new DUPKEYS control statement.
• Improved support for date processing, most notably the ability to convert a Julian date to a printable Gregorian date.
• New and enhanced parameters for the INREC, OUTREC, and OUTFIL OUTREC control statements, such as the addition of IFTHEN and PARSE parameters.
• Enhancements to the INCLUDE/OMIT control statement, such as the NUM feature and simplified syntax.
• Enhancements to the OUTFIL control statement including support for MAXSORT.
• Enhancements to the DB2 Query function to support additional data types.
• Enhanced compatibility with other sort products.