Ex Parte Lawande et al

Patent Trial and Appeal Board

Mar 22, 2018

11461926 (P.T.A.B. Mar. 22, 2018)

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.
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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.
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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
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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
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