Many different areas of the query processor rely on the sort algorithms: merge joins, index creations, stream aggregations, and so on. Sort performance is dramatically improved in SQL Server 7.0.
Many internal improvements make each sort operation faster: simpler comparisons, larger I/O operations, asynchronous I/O, and large memory. In addition, SQL Server 7.0 pipelines data between a sort operation and the query operations on its input and output sides, thus avoiding query plan phases, which were traditionally used in SQL Server and require writing and scanning intermediate work tables.