External Sorting

The classical reference

Donald E. Knuth: The Art of Computer Programming, Volume III: Sorting and Searching. Addison-Wesley 1973, ISBN 0-201-03803-X
Section 5.4 "External Sorting": 247-378

A detailed description of the System R Sort Facility

Theo Härder: A Scan-Driven Sort Facility for a Relational Database System. VLDB 1977: 236-244

A text book introduction to external sorting

Betty Salzberg: File Structures: An Analytic Approach. Prentice-Hall 1988, ISBN 0-13-314550-6
Chapter 4 "External Sorting": 94-138

External sorting in the Volcano system

Goetz Graefe: Parallel External Sorting in Volcano. University of Colorado at Boulder, Computer Science Technical Report CU-CS-459, 1990, Revised Version
Goetz Graefe, Shreekant S. Thakkar: Tuning a Parallel Database Algorithm on a Shared-memory Multiprocessor. Softw., Pract. Exper. 22(7): 495-517(1992)
Goetz Graefe, Ann Linville, Leonard D. Shapiro: Sort versus Hash Revisited. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 6(6): 934-944(1994)

Dina Bitton, David J. DeWitt, David K. Hsiao, Jai Menon: A Taxonomy of Parallel Sorting. ACM Comput. Surv. 16(3): 287-318(1984)
Jai Menon: A Study of Sort Algorithms for Multiprocessor Database Machines. VLDB 1986: 197-206
Bjørn Arild W. Baugstø, Jarle Fredrik Greipsland: Parallel Sorting Methods for Large Data Volumes on a Hypercube Database Computer. IWDM 1989: 127-141
Micah Beck, Dina Bitton, W. Kevin Wilkinson: Sorting Large Files on a Backend Multiprocessor. IEEE Trans. Computers 37(7): 769-778(1988)
Raymond A. Lorie, Honesty C. Young: A Low Communication Sort Algorithm for a Parallel Database Machine. VLDB 1989: 125-134
Betty Salzberg: Merging Sorted Runs Using Large Main Memory. Acta Inf. 27(3): 195-215(1989)
Balakrishna R. Iyer, Daniel M. Dias: System Issues in Parallel Sorting for Database Systems. ICDE 1990: 246-255
Betty Salzberg, Alex Tsukerman, Jim Gray, Michael Stewart, Susan Uren, Bonnie Vaughan: FastSort: A Distributed Single-Input Single-Output External Sort. SIGMOD Conference 1990: 94-101
Mahdi Abdelguerfi, Arun K. Sood: Computational Complexity of Sorting and Joining Relations with Duplicates. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 3(4): 496-503(1991)
Chris Nyberg, Tom Barclay, Zarka Cvetanovic, Jim Gray, David B. Lomet: AlphaSort: A RISC Machine Sort. SIGMOD Conference 1994: 233-242
Chris Nyberg, Tom Barclay, Zarka Cvetanovic, Jim Gray, David B. Lomet: AlphaSort: A Cache-Sensitive Parallel External Sort. VLDB J. 4(4): 603-627(1995)