Lessons learned from doing the one billion row challenge

&gt; My implementation ... All the results are incorrect. The station names should be sorted alphabetically but the last station showing is İzmir and it should be Zürich.<p>It is easy to forget, that names of places can have non-ASCII characters. As this is a speed contest, I wonder how slow the default library implementation for ordering unicode strings alphabetically is in Java?<p>Edit: Apparently there is no universal way to order words alphabetically, but it depends on the (human) language in question.<p>For example, İzmir is in Turkey and in Turkish alphabetical ordering the dotted capital İ comes after the dotless capital I. And in Turkish, Ö comes right after O, but for example in Swedish, the Swedish special letters Å, Ä and Ö are at the very end of the alphabet.<p>How are you supposed to deal with this in this contest? Are you somehow supposed to know that Özalp is a town in Turkey, and thus comes after O in alphabetical ordering, but Örebro is a town in Sweden and should be ordered to the very end of the alphabetical ordering, after Z and Å and Ä?

JVM arguments as an optimization technique give me that winter melancholy.

This is weird. I&#x27;ve read about the 1brc and the first thing I remember is that you need to establish the base result in your pc vs. The metric and then normalize the results to that benchmark.<p>This post doesn&#x27;t seem to take that into account.

Is anyone doing the challenge on other platforms besides java?