Appeal No. 2002-1758
Application No. 09/121,791
We have carefully reviewed the evidence in the case, including the arguments of both
appellants and the examiner and we conclude that appellants make compelling arguments which,
in our view, distinguish the instant claimed invention from that taught by the applied references,
and which have not been satisfactorily answered by the examiner.
For example, both of the instant independent claims require the allocation of the new
page at the same level as the existing page. While there is no doubt that Ishak (relied on by the
examiner for page splitting on a page concurrently being accessed) provides an approach for
maintaining concurrency, it does not appear to describe the instant claimed node splitting
mechanism (i.e., split bit and side entry) in which a newly-allocated page or node is temporarily
linked at the same level as the pre-existing page that is being split.
The instant claims also provide for a side-entry link and accompanying split bits,
identified by appellants as “marking both pages as undergoing a split,” for referencing a sibling
node being created, in order to support highly-concurrent traversal of the B-Tree while the split is
occurring (see page 8 of the brief). Appellants distinguish this from Ishak’s conventional
approach of updating a parent node to point to newly-created children nodes, with Ishak
specifically creating two new nodes.
Appellants further contrast Ishak’s step 706 in Figure 7, requiring updating the old link in
the parent node to point to the HI node instead of the old node, with the instant claims, requiring
split bits and side-entry links when creating a new node at the same level (i.e., a sibling node) as
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