US 5,857,207 A · Storage manager for computer system

Abstract

A data structure and associated data management methods for highly flexible storage of data for a wide variety of application programs. Data is stored as a plurality of Blops, each of which has a list of Properties associated with it. Each Property contains zero or more elements. Elements are Values, each of which has a Basic Type and consists of a variable length sequence of bytes. The Basic Type defines the format of the Value, as well as meta-information such as compression and encryption. Elements can also be Compound Types, which nestably refer to another list of Properties. Blops are stored in Containers, which map to the physical medium on which the data is stored. Containers associate respective Container Handlers which are specific to the Container's physical medium. Related Blops in a Container are organized into Pools of Blops. Each Container contains one or more Pools, each Pool having a unique name within the Container. A Pool contains multiple versions of a Blop. Versions of different Blops are grouped together in Layers in a Pool and each Layer contains at most one version of a Blop. Layers are related to each other as an acyclic digraph, where each Layer is above one or more Base Layers and has zero or more Layers above it. Each Layer presents a "view" to a user of the Blops in a pool, and thereby provides a mechanism to manipulate which versions of which Blops are to be used at any given time.

Claims13

Dependent claims

A method of managing a data structure for the revision of a work, said data structure supporting a plurality of versions of said work and further supporting the association of a name with each of said versions, comprising the steps of:

preparing a first version of said work in said data structure;
associating a predefined name with said first version;
preparing a second version of said work in said data structure;
and
in response to a call to a set-name procedure for said second version with said predefined name and an identification of said first version, performing the further steps of:
(a) determining whether said predefined name is still assigned to said first version;
(b) and if so, then moving said predefined name from said first version to said second version,
said set-name procedure preventing interruptions between said step of determining and said step of moving, by any procedure which modifies the association of names with said first or second versions.

5 more elements

A method of managing a data structure for the revision of a work, said data structure supporting a plurality of blops and a plurality of layers each having a view of at least one of said blops, comprising the steps of:

preparing a first version of said work in said data structure, said first version of said work being divided into the blops which are in the view of a first one of said layers, each of said blops which are in the view of said first one of said layers having a portion of said first version of said work;
preparing a second version of said work in said data structure, said second version being divided into the blops which are in the view of a second one of said layers, each of said blops in the view of said second layer having a portion of said second version of said work;
and
calling an integrate-layers procedure with a reference to a call-back procedure, to form a third version of said work, said integrate-layers procedure performing the steps of:
(a) determining whether a given blop in the view of said first layer is the same as a corresponding blop in the view of said second layer, but a different version of said corresponding blop;
and if so, then
(b) (1) calling said call-back procedure with an identification of said given blop and an identification of said corresponding blop, said call-back procedure returning an identification of a blop to be added to the view of said third layer;
and
(b)(2) adding said blop identified by said call-back procedure to the view of said third layer.

6 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Storage manager for computer system

Life of this patent

Storage manager for computer system

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims13