Sorting the too large size data
Problem
Imagine you have a 20 GB file with one string per line. Explain how you would sort the file.
Solution
When an interviewer gives a size limit of 20 gigabytes, it should tell you something. In this case, it suggests that they don’t want you to bring all the data into memory.
So What do we do? We only bring part of the data into memory.
We will divide the file into chunks which are x megabytes each, where x is the amount of memory we have available. Each chunk is sorted separately and then saved back to the file system.
Once all the chunks are sorted, we then merge the chunks, one by one. At the end, we have a fully sorted file. This algorithm is known as external sort.
About external sorting.