Serialized Child Associations in Parent Record

Abstract

A parent record is created, and the parent record includes a cache for children. Child records are created, and each child record belongs to a parent. Responsive to the creation or update of a child record, the parent record's cache is invalidated. To rebuild the parent record's cache, the child records are serialized and written into the parent record's cache. During a read operation, the parent record is read, including the parent record's cache of children, in a single database access. This results in a substantial savings of time as compared to retrieving the parent and the children from the database separately. Where the number of reads of the parent record greatly exceeds the number of changes to child records, serialized child associations in parent records enhances the efficiency of database access.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.