Description

Developers where possible should utilise the sort stage rather than utilising the link sort facility. The sort stage allows more options for controlling the behaviour of the sort operation, appears in the job monitor as well as better communicating visually to other developers the main functions of the ETL job.

This rule identifies jobs that utilise implicit sorts on a link which may miss some opportunities for performance optimisation, and may reduce the easy maintainability of your jobs. Both link Sorts and explicit Sorts generate the same underlying orchestrate operators, however the explicit Sort stage offers the following options which are ot available on a link Sort:

• Sort Key Mode

• Create Cluster Key Change Column

• Create Key Change Column

• Output Statistics

• Sort Utility

• Restrict Memory Usage

Additionally, the sort stage appears in the job monitor, so progress can be tracked at any point, rather than the job monitor 'going dark' when using a link sort.

Actions

Replace the link sort with an explicit sort stage.