Database systems do not operate on large strings and sort by keys rather than whole rows. And they tend to use hash maps as input invoking truly flat distributi

Database systems do not operate on large strings and sort by keys rather than whole rows. And they tend to use hash maps as input invoking truly flat distributions. They also require sort stability. Burstsort and radix sort are best for cases where you actually sort based on whole or almost whole structure comparison - as in memcmp. Burstsort is also equivalent to walking a trie index in a database. So yes, you see it quite a lot.