Ex Parte Wilkinson et alDownload PDFPatent Trial and Appeal BoardOct 17, 201613175613 (P.T.A.B. Oct. 17, 2016) Copy Citation UNITED STA TES p A TENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR 13/175,613 07 /01/2011 William Kevin Wilkinson 56436 7590 10/19/2016 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. 82749110 2924 EXAMINER MIAN, MUHAMMAD U ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 2163 NOTIFICATION DATE DELIVERY MODE 10/19/2016 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 mkraft@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 WILLIAM KEVIN WILKINSON and ALKIVIADIS SIMITSIS Appeal2015-003835 Application 13/175,613 Technology Center 2100 Before JEAN R. HOMERE, BRUCE R. WINSOR, and JOHN F. HORVATH, Administrative Patent Judges. WINSOR, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL Appellants 1 appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from the final rejection of claims 1-20, which constitute all the claims pending in this application. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b). We reverse. 1 The real party in interest identified by Appellants is Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP, a wholly-owned affiliate of Hewlett-Packard Company. App. Br. 2. Appeal2015-003835 Application 13/175,613 STATEMENT OF THE CASE Appellants' disclosed invention relates to surrogate key generation to facilitate an Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) process that transforms data in operational databases formatted for operational tasks to data in a data warehouse formatted for analytic tasks. (See Spec. i-fi-f l-3.) Claim 1, which is illustrative, reads as follows: 1. A method for massively parallel surrogate key generation performed by a physical computing system, the method compnsmg: creating a lookup record for a production key of an input record, a key of said lookup record comprising said production key and a value of said lookup record comprising both an input record identifier for said input record and a unique identifier of said production key within said input record; sending said lookup record to a first node of a distributed computing system, said first node determined by hashing said production key with a first hash function; and with said first node, determining a surrogate key for said production key. Claims 1-20 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Bland et al. (US 7,779,042 Bl; Aug. 17, 2010) (hereinafter "Bland") and Liu et al. (US 2009/0089560 Al; Apr. 2, 2009) (hereinafter "Liu"). See Final Act. 6-17. Rather than repeat the arguments here, we refer to the Briefs ("App. Br." filed Aug. 15, 2014; "Reply Br."2 filed Feb. 03, 2015) and the Specification ("Spec." filed July 01, 2011) for the positions of Appellants 2 The pages of the Reply Brief are effectively unnumbered. We refer to the 19 pages of the Reply Brief using consecutive numbers, with the caption page being page 1 and the signature page being page 19. 2 Appeal2015-003835 Application 13/175,613 and the Final Otlice Action ("Final Act." mailed Apr. 16, 2014) and Examiner's Answer ("Ans." mailed Dec. 04, 2014) for the reasoning, findings, and conclusions of the Examiner. ISSUE The dispositive issue presented by Appellants' arguments is whether the Examiner errs in finding the combination of Bland and Liu teaches or suggests creating a lookup record for a production key of an input record, a key of said lookup record comprising said production key and a value of said lookup record comprising both an input record identifier for said input record and a unique identifier of said production key within said input record (the "creating a lookup record limitation"), as recited in claim 1. 3 ANALYSIS The Examiner finds that Bland combined with Liu teaches the creating a lookup record limitation. Final Act. 7 (citing Bland, col. 7, 11. 23-39, col. 8, 11. 9-26; Liu i-f 65). The Examiner maps the recited "lookup record" to Eland's "normalized event"; the recited "input record" to Eland's "event" and Liu's "vector"; the recited "production key" to Eland's "natural key"; the recited "unique identifier" to Eland's "EID" ("Entity Identifier," Bland, col. 7, 11. 20-21); and the recited "input record identifier" to Liu's "vector identifier." Id. The Examiner explains as follows: Bland teaches ". . . normalized events that identify entities by their EIDs rather than source-specific natural key identifiers" 3 Appellants' arguments present additional issues. Because the identified issue is dispositive of the appeal, we do not reach the additional issues. 3 Appeal2015-003835 Application 13/175,613 (emphasis added, see Bland col. 7 [l.] 38-39). The Examiner contends that identifying is different than replacing and there is nothing in Bland that suggests that the natural keys are removed or deleted. Ans. 4 (ellipsis in original). Appellants argue, inter alia, that "Appellant[ s have] disclosed and claimed the specific structure of a look up record that allows parallel processing to work in surrogate key generation" (App. Br. 11) and that this structure "is not available in the cited references" (id.). More particularly, Appellants contend, inter alia, "[t]he normalized event taught by Bland apparently no longer includes the 'source-specific natural key,' which has been replaced by the EID." (App. Br. 13.) We agree with Appellants. As an initial matter, we note that we agree with the Examiner that the person of ordinary skill in the art would have learned from the cited references to adapt Eland's surrogate key generation process for parallel processing as taught by Liu. See Ans. 2. However, Appellants' claims are not to the parallel processing of surrogate key generation generally, but to a specific process for doing so using specific data structures, including the one recited in the creating a lookup record limitation. See, e.g., App. Br. 24 (claim 1 ) . Bland teaches "[t]he input adapters translate source-specific events from source-specific formats to normalized events. One of the translation functions is the conversion of natural keys to normalized keys, namely E!Ds or a type of surrogate key." Bland col. 7, 11. 27-33 (emphases added). Bland' s teaching of "translating" and "converting" the "natural key" (mapped to the recited "production key") to an "EID" (mapped to the recited "unique identifier") at least suggests that Eland's "normalized event" 4 Appeal2015-003835 Application 13/175,613 (mapped to the recited "lookup record") contains the EID but not the natural key, which has been translated or converted to the EID. We are constrained by the Examiner's mapping of the claim to Bland and Liu to agree with Appellants' contention that "[the Examiner is] reading more into Bland than is actually there. The Answer has no evidence that the normalized event taught by Bland includes the 'source-specific natural key.' The contrary, one of skill in the art would naturally assume that the natural key has been replaced by the EID." Reply Br. 8-9. We find Appellants demonstrate that the Examiner errs in finding the combination of Bland and Liu teaches or suggests the creating a lookup record limitation. Accordingly, constrained by the record before us, we do not sustain the rejection of (1) independent claim 1; (2) independent claims 11 and 15, which recite limitations substantially similar to the creating a lookup record limitation (compare App. Br. 26 (claim 11) and id. at 27-28 (claim 15) with id. at 24 (claim 1)); and (3) claims 2-10, 12-14, and 16-20, which variously depend, directly or indirectly, from claims 1 and 11 (see In re Fine, 837 F.2d 1071, 1076 (Fed. Cir. 1988) ("Dependent claims are nonobvious under section 103 if the independent claims from which they depend are nonobvious.")). DECISION The decision of the Examiner to reject claims 1-20 is reversed. REVERSED 5 Copy with citationCopy as parenthetical citation