This post tells the "History of massive-scale sorting experiments at Google"

- https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/02/history-of-ma...

When I asked why BigQuery doesn't do these sorts, the answer came straight from the post "Nobody really wants a huge globally-sorted output. We haven’t found a single use case for the problem as stated."

These accomplishments are awesome nevertheless!

Disclaimer: I'm Felipe Hoffa, and I work for Google (http://twitter.com/felipehoffa).