Ex Parte Wein

Patent Trial and Appeal BoardSep 9, 2014

11840283 (P.T.A.B. Sep. 9, 2014)

UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE 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 APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO. 11/840,283 08/17/2007 David Wein 1933.1750001 1037 82515 7590 09/09/2014 Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox P.L.L.C. 1100 New York Avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20005 EXAMINER AHLUWALIA, NAVNEET K ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 2166 MAIL DATE DELIVERY MODE 09/09/2014 PAPER 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. PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07) UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE ____________ BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD ____________ Ex parte DAVID WEIN __________ Appeal 2011-011819 Application 11/840,2831 Technology Center 2100 ____________ Before HUBERT C. LORIN, JOSEPH A. FISCHETTI, and NINA L. MEDLOCK, Administrative Patent Judges. LORIN, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL STATEMENT OF THE CASE David Wein (Appellant) seeks our review under 35 U.S.C. § 134 (2002) of the final rejection of claims 1–44. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b) (2002). SUMMARY OF DECISION We AFFIRM-IN-PART.2 1 Appellant identifies Sybase, Inc. as the real party in interest. App. Br. 3. 2 Our decision will make reference to the Appellant’s Appeal Brief (“App. Br.,” filed Jan. 28, 2011) and the Examiner’s Answer (“Ans.,” mailed Apr. 13, 2011). Appeal 2011-011819 Application 11/840,283 2 THE INVENTION Claim 1, reproduced below, is illustrative of the subject matter on appeal. 1. A method for allocating workload amongst a plurality of database servers sharing access to data, the method comprising: periodically collecting information about workload at each database server; distributing the workload information to each of said plurality of database servers; in response to a client connected to a first database server requesting that work be performed, examining the workload information at the first database server to determine whether the requested work should be performed at a second database server having a lower workload than the first database server; if it is determined at the first database server that the work should be performed at the second database server, automatically transferring the client connection to the second database server and performing the requested work at the second database server; and otherwise, performing the requested work at the first database server. THE REJECTION The Examiner relies upon the following as evidence of unpatentability: Hill Brown US 2004/0267897 A1 US 2007/0271570 A1 Dec. 30, 2004 Nov. 22, 2007 The following rejection is before us for review: 1. Claims 1–44 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Brown and Hill. Appeal 2011-011819 Application 11/840,283 3 ISSUE Did the Examiner err in rejecting claims 1–44 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Brown and Hill? FINDINGS OF FACT We rely on the Examiner’s factual findings stated in the Answer. Additional findings of fact may appear in the Analysis below. ANALYSIS In the Brief, claims 1–44 are divided into four separate groups and argued separately: (a) claims 1–4, 9–11, 13, 14, 30, 32–36, and 39–41 (App. Br. 8–12); (b) claims 15–19, 23–29, 31, 42, and 43 (id. at 12); (c) claims 12 and 44 (id. at 12–13); and (d) claims 5–8, 20–22, 37, and 38 (id. at 13–14). Claims 1–4, 9–11, 13, 14, 30, 32–36, and 39–41 The Appellant argued claims 1–4, 9–11, 13, 14, 30, 32–36, and 39–41 as a group (App. Br. 8–12). Claim 1 is selected as the representative claim for this group, and the remaining claims 2–4, 9–11, 13, 14, 30, 32–36, and 39–41 stand or fall with claim 1. 37 C.F.R. § 41.37(c)(1)(vii) (2011). Brown is cited as disclosing all the claim limitations except that “Brown is . . . unclear about the workload being examined centrally or at each server node to determine processing of information.” Ans. 4. However, according to the Examiner, “Hill teaches the full distribution and provision of managers to run at each server in paragraphs 65, 82, 87 – 88, and 169 – 170.” Id. According to the Examiner, Appeal 2011-011819 Application 11/840,283 4 [i]t would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art of data processing at the time of the present invention to combine the teachings of cited references because both references of record are directed to same field of study namely, managing resources while improving system efficiency for a distributed system. Furthermore, Hill’s method of full distribution and provision of managers to run at each server improves functionality and scalability, paragraphs 65, 82, and 170. Id. The Appellant admits that “Appellant does not claim to have invented the notion of workload management.” App. Br. 8. Rather “Appellant’s workload management solution is fully distributed and provides for workload managers to run at each database server node of the cluster.” Id. (emphasis added). According to the Appellant, “[t]he data used by these workload managers is maintained at each node of the cluster. This fully distributed architecture provides several advantages . . . . ” Id. at 9 (emphasis added). This is argued as being in contrast to “Brown [which] relies on a centralized ‘regulator’ module for regulating workload . . . .” Id. The distinction between a distributed database cluster system, as said to be claimed, and a centralized system, as Brown is alleged to disclose, is not reflected in many of the claims. We understand that a cluster system “involve[s] a plurality of networked server nodes which are clustered together to function as a single system.” Spec. 3. Many of the claims on appeal, however, make no mention of a “cluster” or “nodes,” let alone a plurality of networked server nodes clustered together to function as a single system. Those claims that we find are not limited to a distributed database cluster system are claims 1–4, 9–11, 13, and 14. As to these claims, the Appeal 2011-011819 Application 11/840,283 5 argument that the claimed invention is directed to a database cluster system in distinction over the cited prior art cannot be persuasive as to error in the rejection because it is not commensurate in scope with what is more broadly claimed. As to claims 30, 32–36, and 39–41, which do describe a distributed database cluster system, the question is whether there is, in fact, an unobvious distinction between the distributed database cluster system as claimed and the system of the cited prior art combination. In that regard, the Examiner conceded that “Brown is . . . unclear about the workload being examined centrally or at each server node to determine processing of information” (Ans. 4) but relied on Hill. “Hill teaches the full distribution and provision of managers to run at each server in paragraphs 65, 82, 87 – 88, and 169 – 170.” Id. Based on our review, of paragraphs 65, 82, 87–88, and 169–170, it appears Hill, in fact, discloses a “fully distributed” (see ¶ 82) system; that is; a system with “components(s) . . . running on each server in the server pool that is to be controlled . . . [which] means that there is no centralized component.” Id. See also ¶ 88 (“fully distributed”) and ¶ 169 (“Several components of the daemon are fully distributed in that they communicate with their corresponding peers on each server in the pool.”). We do not see and the Appellant does not fully explain the difference between the “distributed database cluster . . . system” of claims 30, 32–36, and 39–41, and the fully distributed system that Hill discloses. Both appear to function as a single system involving a plurality of networked server nodes/peers. Appeal 2011-011819 Application 11/840,283 6 The Appellant admits that “Hill does include some distributed workload management features” (App. Br. 9). But the Appellant “believes that Hill’s teachings are not directly relevant to Appellant’s claimed invention” (id.) because Hill “provides a data center technology for policy- based performance management of a pool of servers in a data center” (id.) rather than “operat[ing] in a database management system environment” (notwithstanding the “specific mention that Hill makes of database systems is a statement is that historical data may be exported to relational database systems (Hill paragraph [0140])”). Id. But the question is not whether Hill discloses the claimed fully distributed cluster system, but whether Hill would have led one of ordinary skill in the art to modify Brown’s centralized system to the fully distributed cluster system as claimed. As the Examiner (Ans. 4) indicates, Hill discusses various efficiencies one can achieve via a fully distributed system. Hill teaches a system which monitors “an inventory of all running applications across the servers” and enforces resource usage policy “(e.g., limited demand for the application, or a small number of connections).” Hill ¶¶ 98 and 106, respectively. Thus, “the user may adjust the policy applicable to those applications which are reported to be over-utilized or under-utilized in order to tune (or optimize) the distribution of server pool resources between the applications.” ¶ 106. Hill’s fully distributed system provides an improvement in functionality and scalability over a centralized server system like the one Brown discloses. For this reason, we find the evidence weighs in favor of the Examiner’s position that it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art Appeal 2011-011819 Application 11/840,283 7 given the cited prior art combination to employ a distributed database cluster system as claimed. Appellant further argues that Brown does not teach the step of transferring client connections from one database server node to another database server node of the cluster based on workload. App. Br. 9. The Examiner argues that the element is disclosed in both Brown and Hill. Ans. 19–20. We do not find it in Brown. But we do find it in Hill. We agree with the Appellant that Brown discloses balancing workloads and accomplishes this by delaying the execution of database queries. See ¶ 84 (“The workload query (delay) manager 610, shown in greater detail in FIG. 7, receives an assigned request as an input. A comparator 705 determines if the request should be queued or released for execution.”) See also ¶ 85 (“If the comparator 705 determines that the request should not be executed, it places the request in a queue 710 along with any other requests for which execution has been delayed.”) But in employing a fully distributed system, as one of ordinary skill in the art would have been led to do given Hill, the workload would necessarily be distributed in a fully distributed system, not a centralized system. Therefore, one would look to Hill, not Brown, to understand workload management in a fully distributed environment. In that environment, as the Examiner points out (Ans. 20), Hill’s fully distributed system provides the ability to regulate utilization of computer resources of a plurality of computers. See ¶ 22 (“an enforcement module at each computer for which resources are to be regulated for regulating usage of resources based on the transferred rules and the resource utilization information received from other Appeal 2011-011819 Application 11/840,283 8 connected computers.”) Given this disclosure, we find the evidence weighs in favor of the Examiner’s position that given the cited prior art combination it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to not only employ a distributed database cluster system as claimed, but to manage a workload via a system such that “if it is determined at [a] first database server that the work should be performed at [a] second database server, automatically transferring [a] client connection to the second database server and performing the requested work at the second database server” (claim 1). For the foregoing reasons, we are not persuaded as to error in the rejection. The rejection is sustained. Claims 15–19, 23–29, 31, 42, and 43 The Appellant argued claims 15–19, 23–29, 31, 42, and 43 as a group (App. Br. 12–13). Claim 15 is selected as the representative claim for this group, and the remaining claims 16–19, 23–29, 31, 42, and 43 stand or fall with claim 15. 37 C.F.R. § 41.37(c)(1)(vii) (2011). The Examiner’s position as to the patentability of independent claim 15 is the same as that summarized above for independent claim 1. The Appellant argues that claim 15 “includes providing an ordered list of database servers to which a given client should connect based on workload.” App. Br. 12 (emphasis added). The argument is not commensurate in scope with what is claimed. Claim 15 includes limitations for distributing load scores to each of a plurality of servers and redirecting a client to a server based on those scores. But “if it is determined that the client should be redirected to another server, providing the client with an Appeal 2011-011819 Application 11/840,283 9 ordered list of servers to which the client may connect” (claim 15). Claim 15 does not require the provided list to be based on workload. Because the argument is not commensurate in scope with what is claimed, the rejection is sustained. Claims 12 and 44 Claims 12 and 44 provide a client with an ordered list of database servers to which the client should connect upon failure of the client’s current connection to a given database server. The Examiner stated that this is shown in Brown at paragraphs 38, 42, 43, 47–49, 75, 84, 85, and 125. Ans. 8. We have reviewed these passages but do not find there any disclosure of providing an ordered list as claimed. At best, these passages describe comparing a workload group’s performance against workload rules as part of a monitoring process. They do not disclose providing an ordered list as claimed in operating a fully distributed system. The rejection of claims 12 and 44 is not sustained. Claims 5–8, 20–22, 37, and 38 The Appellant argues that these claims “include[] features enabling database servers in the cluster to be organized into a plurality of ‘logical clusters,’ with each logical cluster including at least one database server and associated with a particular application.” App. Br. 13. This is an accurate characterization of what these claims cover. The Examiner cites paragraphs 42, 47–48, 55, 80–81, 87, 119, 125, 136, and 151 of Brown as evidence that said features are disclosed in the prior art. Ans. 6. But, based on our review of these passages, there is no Appeal 2011-011819 Application 11/840,283 10 mention there of clusters, let alone a plurality of logical clusters, each logical cluster comprising at least one database server and associated with a particular application as claimed. Notwithstanding that “Brown is . . . unclear about the workload being examined centrally or at each server node to determine processing of information” (id. at 4), a preponderance of the evidence does not support the obviousness of the subject matter of claims 5– 8, 20–22, 37, and 38 over the cited prior art combination. The rejection as to these claims is not sustained. CONCLUSIONS The rejection of claims 1–4, 9–11, 13–19, 23–36, and 39–42 under § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Brown and Hill is affirmed. The rejection of claims 5–8, 12, 20–22, 37, 38, 43, and 44 under § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Brown and Hill is reversed. DECISION The decision of the Examiner to reject claims 1–44 is affirmed-in- part. No time period for taking any subsequent action in connection with this appeal may be extended under 37 C.F.R. § 1.136(a). See 37 C.F.R. 1.136(a)(1)(iv). AFFIRMED-IN-PART hh