Abstract: Embodiments of the present invention pertain to a method and apparatus for a scalable sorting of a data set in a database on a computer system. A number of contiguous ranges spanning the data set are defined. Each individual data value of the data set is assigned to a range to which it falls into. The values in the ranges are then sorted. The sorting can be performed by different nodes in parallel. Once the sorting is completed, the results are stored in contiguous memory locations. This results the overall data set being sorted.