Appeal No. 2001-1605
Application 08/735,168
without locking the entire table. See page 1 of Appellants’
specification. The need to provide concurrent access to database
content is a recurring requirement in current database
technology. Concurrency applies to multiple applications
requiring access to the same data at the same time through one
database management system. The virtually universal technique of
concurrency control is locking. In this regard, an application
will acquire a lock on an object in the database in which it has
an interest for reading, inserting, deleting, or changing. In
order to ensure that the object will not change while the
application is accessing it, the database management system
provides a lock giving the application access to the object,
while preventing other applications from modifying the object so
long as the application holds the lock. See pages 1 and 2 of
Appellants’ specification.
In relational database systems, contents of a database are
represented as tables of database values. Each table corresponds
to a relation. In a relational database, a table can be divided
into partitions. Each partition contains a portion of the data
in the table. By partitioning a table, partitions containing
more frequently-used data can be placed on faster devices, and
parallel processing of data can be improved by spreading
2
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