Re: TRM - Morbidity has set in, or not?

"J M Davitt" <jdavitt_at_aeneas.net> wrote in message news:Z_99g.24008$YI5.23255_at_tornado.ohiordc.rr.com...
> Marshall Spight wrote:
> > Frank Hamersley wrote:
> >
> >>Is there any veracity in _any_ of the claims made by _any_ of the
parties?
> >>
> >>Given lots of mud gets flung as the discussion proceeds so I wondered if
> >>there was any corroborative or contrary sources.
> >
> >
> > The "transrelational" stuff doesn't have much written about it.

> Yeah, other than the patent application - which is tortuous - there's
> little out there. To confuse the issue, other products are described
> as transrelational - Cache, IIRC, is one.

I thought patents were supposed to be complete. Full disclosure! At least here in Novelia we have this little requirement, I think. Discoveries, ideas, equations and algorithms are not patentable.:-) I wonder what is patentable. :-)

> I can't
> > find
> > anything to suggest that it's anything besides a traditional column
> > store.
> > Various parties, including FP himself, have on occasion said, "oh no,
> > it's much more than that" but they don't back it up at all, so their
> > claims
> > are unevaluable.

> It *is* much more that a column store storage scheme. I don't know
> whether you've read a description of TRM, but it features (a) a
> not-so-surprising ordered collection of observed values, (b) a mildly
> clever permutation and inverse permutation index, and (c) a very clever
> "record reconstruction table."

Is this patentable ?

> > Michael Stonebreaker has a small company that is selling a column
> > store; it looks quite interesting.

> If we're talking about the C-Store he was involved with, it does feature
> a column-wise storage scheme. But, unlike TRM, values will appear in
> storage just as many times as they appear in the "logical" records
> being represented. C-Store makes extensive use of compression and,
> IIRC, is able to performs restricts and selects based on the compressed
> representations of values. Besides that, one of C-Store's big features
> is a technique for replicating a data store at different sites and
> knowing, at all sites, the most recent instant for which all sites have
> the same values.

How is compression different from "each value - stored only once" ? From what I've heard, compression algorithms are not patentable. :-) And yet, compression is fundamental in "computer science". Received on Mon May 15 2006 - 13:05:45 CEST