Re: [HACKERS] [Fwd: AW: More UB-Tree patent information]

On Wed, 2002-04-10 at 21:55, Justin Clift wrote:
> Hannu Krosing wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 2002-04-10 at 16:32, Justin Clift wrote:
> > > Hi everyone,
> > >
> > > This is Prof. Bayer's response to the question "is it alright to use
> > > UB-Tree's in Open Source projects?".
> >
> > Have you found out _what_ exaclty is patented ?
> >
> > Is it just his concrete implementation of "UB-Tree" or something
> > broader, like using one multi-dimensional index instead of multiple
> > one-dimensional ones ?
>
> Is there any way of finding out instead of asking him directly?  Maybe
> the patent places have online info?

I did a quick search at USPTO at
http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/search-bool.html
on "UB and Tree and index and database" and found among other things a
US patent no. 5,826,253 on mechanism very similar to LISTEN/NOTIFY,
afforded to Borland on October 20, 1998 based on application from April
19, 1996.
We should be safe as already Postgres95 had them ;)

when I searched for "UB and Tree and index and database and Bayer"
0 results came back.

when I omitted UB and searched for "Tree and index and database and
Bayer" I got 27 results, first of them on "Method and composition for
improving sexual fitness" ;)

the one possibly related related to our Bayer was nr 6,219,662 on
"Supporting database indexes based on a generalized B-tree index"
which had reference to :

Rudolf Bayer, "The Universal B-Tree for Multidimensional Indexing:
General Concepts", Worldwide Computing and Its Applications,
International Conference, WWCA '97, Tsukuba, Japan, (Mar. 1997), pp.
198-209.

and German patent 0 650 131 A1 which may be also relevant

----------------------
Hannu