An Oracle patent on a fast sorting algorithm called "Orasort" has expired after 20 years, making it available for open source databases. The algorithm combines common prefix skipping, adaptive switching between quicksort and radix sort, and key substring caching to achieve approximately 5x performance improvement over previous sorting methods. Inventor Mark Callaghan detailed the approach, which was implemented in Oracle 10gR2, and the database community has shown immediate interest in implementing it in systems like MySQL and PostgreSQL.
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