Ex Parte Lawande et alDownload PDFPatent Trial and Appeal BoardMar 22, 201811461926 (P.T.A.B. Mar. 22, 2018) Copy Citation UNITED STA TES p A TENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR 111461,926 08/02/2006 Shilpa Lawande 56436 7590 03/26/2018 Hewlett Packard Enterprise 3404 E. Harmony Road Mail Stop 79 Fort Collins, CO 80528 UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE United States Patent and Trademark Office Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS P.O. Box 1450 Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450 www .uspto.gov ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO. 82836837 4451 EXAMINER BURKE, JEFF A ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 2159 NOTIFICATION DATE DELIVERY MODE 03/26/2018 ELECTRONIC Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding. The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication. Notice of the Office communication was sent electronically on above-indicated "Notification Date" to the following e-mail address( es): hpe.ip.mail@hpe.com chris.mania@hpe.com PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07) UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD Ex parte SHILP A LA WANDE, ALEXANDER RASIN, OMER TRAJMAN AND STANLEY B. ZDONIK 1 Appeal 2016-007983 Application 11/461,926 Technology Center 2100 Before CARL W. WHITEHEAD JR, BRUCE R. WINSOR and CHRISTA P. ZADO, Administrative Patent Judges. WHITEHEAD JR., Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL STATEMENT OF THE CASE Appellants are appealing the final rejection of claims 34---63 under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a). Appeal Brief 4. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b) (2012). We reverse. Introduction The invention "is concerned not so much with such logical-design elements as it is with physical database design, which affects how much 1 According to Appellants, the Real Party in Interest is Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP, identified as "a wholly-owned affiliate of Hewlett Packard Enterprise." Appeal Brief 2. Appeal 2016-007983 Application 11/461,926 storage space the data require and how quickly they can be updated and retrieved." Specification 2. Illustrative Claim 34. A computer-implemented method comprising: for each of multiple candidate sort orders of a table having rows and columns, determining a cost based on candidate training queries that have execution costs that satisfy an improvement criterion; based on the respective costs of the candidate sort orders, selecting sort orders at least one of which satisfies all of the candidate training quenes; for each of the selected sort orders, adding, to a design of a database, an included projection, wherein a projection is a subset of the columns of the table sorted according to a same order, the columns of the projection to be physically stored in accordance with the selected sort order; and each of the multiple candidate sort orders from which the sort orders are selected defining an order with respect to a putative projection comprising a view of one or more columns that are not necessarily identical to the columns of the included projection. Rejections on Appeal Claims 34, 42, 44, 52, 54 and 62 stand rejected under pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Abadi ("Integrating Compression and Execution in Column-Oriented Database Systems," published June 2006) and Lawande (US Patent Application Publication 2005/0187917 Al; published August 25, 2005). Final Action 2-5. 2 Appeal 2016-007983 Application 11/461,926 Claims 37-39, 47--49 and 57-59 stand rejected under pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Lawande and Stonebraker (C- store: A Column-oriented DBMS, published 2005). Final Action 5-7. Claims 35, 36, 41, 45, 46, 51, 55, 56 and 61 stand rejected under pre- AIA 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Abadi, Lawande and Farrar (US Patent Application Publication 2005/0203940 Al; published September 15, 2005). Final Action 7-10. Claims 40, 50 and 60 stand rejected underpre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Lawande, Stonebreaker and Tian-lei (Automatic Relational Database Compression Scheme Design based on Swarm Evolution, published April 6, 2006). Final Action 10-11. Claims 43, 53 and 63 stand rejected under pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Abadi, Lawande and Lightstone (US Patent Application Publication 2006/0184338 Al; published August 17, 2006). Final Action 11-13. ANALYSIS Rather than reiterate the arguments of Appellants and the Examiner, we refer to the Appeal Brief (filed January 8, 2016), the Answer (mailed June 16, 2016) and the Final Action (mailed August 3, 2015) for the respective details. Appellants contend the Examiner confuses an "index" with a "projection." Appeal Brief 11. Appellants provide a declaration2 by Shilpa Lawande, one of the named inventors, that "[i]ndexes are not projections." Declaration, paragraph 6. The Examiner finds: 2 Signed June 30, 2015 filed with the Appeal Brief. 3 Appeal 2016-007983 Application 11/461,926 [T]he examiner never relies on the "indexes" as recited in Lawande (US Publication No. 2005/0187917) as indexes, the examiner, in fact, relies on Lawande only to teach "determining a cost based on candidate training queries that have execution costs that satisfy an improvement criterion" (see pg. 4, Final Rejection, dated 8/3/2015). In other words, the examiner never relies on the indexes of Lawande to teach the projections of the claimed limitation because Abadi clearly discloses projections (see Abadi, pg. 673 section 3). Answer 2. The Examiner further finds: Abadi and Lawande are analogous art because they are in the same field of endeavor, database index improvement. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, at the time of the endeavor, to modify the method of Abadi to include the cost determination of Lawande, to allow sort orders to be selected based on cost improvement criterion. Answer4. Appellants contend, "Lawande describes determining what indexes to use when executing a query in an existing, indexed database. Lawande does not describe the use of projections and never even mentions the term." Appeal Brief 14. Appellants conclude: [T]he [Final] Action has conceded that Abadi does not teach or suggest "for each of multiple candidate sort orders of a table having rows and columns, determining a cost based on candidate training queries that have execution costs that satisfy an improvement criterion." (Claim 34). Accordingly, Abadi cannot teach or suggest any of the subsequent elements of claim 34 that build on this cost-based determination. Lawande describes using indexes to execute a query in an existing database. Lawande has nothing to do with, and does not even mention, a projection. Appeal Brief 14. We agree with the Examiner's finding that Abadi and Lawande are analogous art because they both address database structures, as does 4 Appeal 2016-007983 Application 11/461,926 Appellants' invention. However, we find Appellants' arguments persuasive because it is not evident from the Examiner's findings that there is a correlation between Abadi's projections and Lawande's indexes that would lead one of ordinary skill in the art to modify Abadi's projections to take into account the cost basis, taught in Lawande, as claimed. We are constrained by the record before us, we reverse the Examiner's obviousness rejection of independent claims 34, 44 and 54, as well as, the obviousness rejections of dependent claims 35--43, 45-53 and 55---63. DECISION The Examiner's obviousness rejections of claims 34--63 are reversed. REVERSED 5 Copy with citationCopy as parenthetical citation