Case Study: Korea's National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (NACF) achieves rapid, multi‑gigabyte ETL and two‑month warehouse implementation with Innovative Routines International (IRI) CoSort

CoSort Tackles Another Major ETL Project

NACF (Korea’s National Agricultural Cooperative Federation) faced a failed first data‑warehouse attempt in 1999 due to a complex database design and the inability to find an ETL able to handle massive volumes (initial extracts >100GB, loads >400GB, total warehouse ~1TB, plus daily processing of ~3GB and loading ~10GB). For its second attempt (mid‑2000 to spring 2001) NACF selected Innovative Routines International (IRI)’s CoSORT sortcl flat‑file ETL solution to address these scale and performance challenges.

Innovative Routines International (IRI) implemented CoSORT (sortcl), providing high‑speed sorting, merging, joining, data conversion (EBCDIC→ASCII) and resource‑tuning options; with IRI’s solution NACF completed the ETL design and implementation in about two months after the database design was set, achieved sorts of 1GB in under four minutes on its IBM RS/6000 S80, and successfully processed the massive initial and daily loads to deliver the operational data warehouse by spring 2001. IRI’s responsive support and localized documentation further accelerated customization and deployment.

NACF

Byung Chul

Adviser