DETAILED ACTION
Status of Claims
This action is in reply to the application filed on 08/10/2023.
Claims 1-20 are currently pending and have been examined.
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
Claims 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
Claims 1, 13, and 19 each recite determine a most efficient source from which to source the portion of the data, but neither the claims nor Applicant’s as-filed Specification (AppSpec) provide any suggestion regarding the metric by which ‘efficiency’ is being measured and it is unclear what characteristics are necessary for a source to be the “most efficient source” and unclear what manner of analysis falls within the scope of determining the “most efficient source”.
The recited “most efficient source” is a term of degree, and “when a term of degree is used in the claim, the examiner should determine whether the specification provides some standard for measuring that degree…If the specification does not provide some standard for measuring that degree, a determination must be made as to whether one of ordinary skill in the art could nevertheless ascertain the scope of the claim (e.g., a standard that is recognized in the art for measuring the meaning of the term of degree). For example, in Ex parte Oetiker, 23 USPQ2d 1641 (Bd. Pat. App. & Inter. 1992), the phrases "relatively shallow," "of the order of," "the order of about 5mm," and "substantial portion" were held to be indefinite because the specification lacked some standard for measuring the degrees intended” (MPEP 2173.05(b)).
Here, AppSpec provides no standard or guidance by which “efficiency” can be measured or determined such that one of ordinary skill in the art would understand the scope of the claims. The claims and AppSpec describe that the efficiency determination “comprises analyzing one or more predefined factors”, but the exemplary factors provided in AppSpec and the claims only add to the ambiguity as the vast majority of the factors have no discernable correlation to typical measures of efficiency (e.g. speed, cost) employed in the art; for example, claims 3 and 4: “wherein at least one of the one or more predefined factors comprise data type of the portion of the data such that the dynamically determining comprises analyzing the data type of the portion of the data…wherein the data type comprises metadata selected from the group consisting of applicability of personally identifiable information to the portion of the data, applicability of Sarbanes-Oxley Act to the portion of the data, and applicability of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act to the portion of the data.” It is unclear how PII/SOX/HIPPA “applicability” relates to data source efficiency. See also AppSpec ¶0079 which appears to suggest that simply determining the only capable source falls within the scope: “If the data can be sourced from the cloud operational data store…then this would be the default source for the request. However, if the data cannot be sourced from the cloud operational data store then another cloud DC or an on-premise DC is used to source the data” (emphasis added).
In order to advance prosecution, Examiner has interpreted the limitation as being written “dynamicallyselecting a source from which to source the portion…”.
Any claim listed in the rejection heading not explicitly listed in the body is rejected for being dependent upon a rejected claim.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claims 1-3, 5-7, 11, 13-16, 19, and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Nawrocke et al. (US 2020/0356559 A1).
Claims 1, 11, 13, and 19:
Nawrocke discloses the limitations as shown in the following rejections:
A hybrid-cloud infrastructure environment facilitating resilient data access through access routing, the hybrid-cloud infrastructure environment comprising: at least one public-cloud server (e.g. 102a); at least one private on-premise server (e.g. 102c) (0031-0035, 0101; FIG. 1); “database environment may include databases implemented on multiple computing platforms 102a-102c, such as a first cloud computing platform 102a…a datalake 102b implemented on a second cloud computing platform, on-premise computing equipment, or other computing platform; and an on-premise computing platform 102c.” (¶0031)
a computer system comprising: at least one processor; a communication interface communicatively coupled to the at least one processor; and a memory device storing executable code that, when executed, causes the at least one processor to: receive, via a client device (user computing device), an application programming interface (API) call to access (query, e.g. fetch) a portion of data (¶0036-0039, 0072-0075; FIG. 1).
dynamically determine a most efficient source from which to source the portion of the data, wherein the most efficient (e.g. lowest cost, lowest latency, available) source is selected from the group consisting of (i) the at least one public-cloud server, (ii) the at least one private on-premise server, and (iii) a cloud operational data store (local computing platform “P” cache), wherein the dynamically determining comprises analyzing one or more predefined factors (e.g. metrics, constraints, policies, filters) (¶0090-0094, 0183-0186, 0200-0202; FIG. 4 and 18), “The sources S1-S3…may be embodied as any of the computing platforms 102a-102c…method 400 may include identifying 406 possible alternative sources for performing each operation. For example, FIG. 5A shows one set of alternatives with…data accesses being performed on the sources S1-S3 storing the data being accessed (¶0090-0091)…method 400 may include determining 408 metrics for each alternative according to the query performance model (¶0093)”
transmit a request to the most efficient source to access the portion of the data; retrieve the portion of the data (query result) from the most efficient source; and expose the portion of the data for access via the client device (¶0073-0075, 0096, 0123-0124), “The operation may be executed 1204 with respect to the source. In particular, the engine 104 may issue a request to the source that the subject table and the database 1002 to perform the operation. The source returns a result of the operation to the engine 104, which returns the result to the interface 108a-108c that issued the query that included the operation through the unified access layer” (¶0124).
[Claim 11, 13, 19] redundantly store the data to (iii) the cloud operational data store (local computing platform “P” cache) from (i) the at least one public-cloud server and (ii) the at least one private on-premise server (¶0093, 0200-0203, 0063).
Claims 2, 14, and 20:
Nawrocke discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Nawrocke further discloses wherein the one or more predefined factors are selected from the group consisting of data type, data state, and data availability (¶0040-0043, 0181-0183).
Claims 3 and 15:
Nawrocke discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Nawrocke further discloses wherein at least one of the one or more predefined factors comprise data type of the portion of the data such that the dynamically determining comprises analyzing the data type (e.g. applicability of privacy policies, location prohibitions, trust scores) of the portion of the data (¶0092, 0181, 0194)
Claims 5, 6 and 16:
Nawrocke discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Nawrocke further discloses wherein at least one of the one or more predefined factors comprise a data state of the portion of the data such that the dynamically determining comprises analyzing the data state of the portion of the data…wherein the data state comprises metadata comprising at least one of historical status (e.g. update frequency, query history) of the portion of the data and pendency status (e.g. cache version validity) of the portion of the data (¶0128-0134, 0182, 0188, 0201-0202).
Claim 7:
Nawrocke discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Nawrocke further discloses wherein at least one of the one or more predefined factors comprise data availability due to reliability and timeliness for accessing the portion of the data (¶0043-0046,0068-0070, 0182).
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claim 4 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Nawrocke et al. (US 2020/0356559 A1) in view of Riley et al. (US 2017/0193244 A1).
Claim 4:
Nawrocke discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Regarding the limitations of claim 4, Nawrocke at least suggests the subject matter “Possible alternatives may be filtered with respect to policies 110. In particular, some data may be prohibited from being cached on local computing platform P or on a different source than its current source due to privacy or other concerns” (¶0092), but does not explicitly disclose wherein the data type comprises metadata selected from the group consisting of applicability of personally identifiable information to the portion of the data, applicability of Sarbanes-Oxley Act to the portion of the data, and applicability of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act to the portion of the data.
Riley, however, discloses (FIG. 1) an analogous system for querying data aggregated from multiple sources, including disclosing (¶0016, 0025, 0029-0033) selecting a source to source a data access request including analyzing rules and conditions that restrict source data set including presence of personally identifiable information and applicability of laws and regulations (e.g. SOX, HIPAA). Exemplary quotation “the data sets 95 can include restricted information, such as, for example, personal identifiable information of individuals or similar identifiers for other entities. In such context, the term “restricted” or variants thereof is intended to mean data which is subject to one or more rules or conditions which control when and how such data can be used by the data aggregation system…the rules or conditions which restricted data sets 95 can include laws, regulations” (¶0016).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art prior to the filing date of the invention to modify Nawrocke to employ Riley’s method of enabling enforcement of data usage rules when resolving data access queries because it “optimizes a collection of records for search operations by third-parties, while at the same time controlling use of the data being queries so that compliance with source-specific usage rules are met. With the assurance of compliance, a larger data set can be aggregated and provided for search. Additionally, the optimization implemented for search ensures the querying entity can more efficiently receive a complete and credible response to a query, thereby reducing the load on the computational resources that provide the data aggregation system” (¶0009).
Claims 8, 9 and 18 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Nawrocke et al. (US 2020/0356559 A1) in view of Cao et al. (“PolarDB-X: An Elastic Distributed Relational Database for Cloud-Native Applications”, 2022).
Claims 8 and 18:
Nawrocke discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Nawrocke further discloses (FIG. 1 and 16; ¶0036-0038, 0040-0043, 0186-0189) the hybrid multi-cloud data management system includes an API layer (unified access layer 106) facilitate the API call by communicating the API call to a respective data access router (query engine 104) by way of a respective data access engine (tuning module) and a respective data provider registry (policies 110 and metrics 116 storage). Nawrocke further discloses (¶0062) that the query engine is scalable and “may expand storage and computation resources allocated to the scalable query engine 104 in response to usage data”, but does not describe scaling the number of instances and does not specifically disclose the hybrid cloud infrastructure environment further comprises an external load balancer configured to direct the API call to at least one instance of two instances of an API layer, the two instances comprising a read only instance and a read/write instance, wherein the at least one instances is selected based on geographic proximity.
Cao, however, discloses (pg. 2860-2861, sect. II-A and Fig. 2; pg. 2862, sect. II-C and Fig. 3; pg. 2866, col. 1, para. 2) an analogous distributed database system including an external load balancer configured to direct the API call to at least one instance of two instances of a computation node (CN) with corresponding data node (DN) where the two instances comprising a read only (RO) instance and a read/write (RW) instance, wherein the at least one instances is selected based on geographic proximity. Exemplary quotation:
"The load balancer...exposes a single entry point (i.e., virtual IP) to SQL clients for each PolarDB-X instance. It is location aware, which tends to disperse client connections to nearby backends (e.g., CN servers co-located in the same datacenter)...A CN is always deployed in the same datacenter with underlying DN...DN is equivalent to the database nodes (RW and RO nodes) in PolarDB...an instance includes one primary (i.e., RW node) and multiple read replicas (i.e., RO nodes). RO replicas can be scaled horizontally to improve the capacity of processing analytical queries" (pg. 2861, sect. II-A).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art prior to the filing date of the invention to modify Nawrocke’s query engine in accordance with the architecture of Cao’s PolarDB-X system to facilitate rapid horizontal scaling to improve the capacity of processing analytical queries and to leverage “a series of DBA- and developer-friendly features in PolarDB-X to enhance usability, e.g., anti-hotspot, automated traffic control, and index recommendation.” (see Cao pg. 2860-2861).
Claim 9:
The combination of Nawrocke/Cao discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Nawrocke further discloses (FIG. 1 and 16; ¶0036-0038, 0040-0043, 0186-0189) wherein the dynamically determining is performed based on communication between the respective data access engine (tuning module) and the respective data provider registry (policies 110 and metrics 116 storage), and wherein the transmitting is performed, at least in part, via the respective data access router (query engine).
Claims 10 and 17 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Nawrocke et al. (US 2020/0356559 A1) in view of Padbidri et al. (US 2022/0405294 A1) in further view of Gilmartin (US 2015/0332422 A1).
Claims 10 and 17:
Nawrocke discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Nawrocke further discloses (¶0093-0096, 0200-0203) wherein a default source of the data is the cloud operational data store (local platform cache). Nawrocke does not elaborate on the data transfer process when transferring data from sources to the local platform cache and does not specifically disclose wherein the cloud operational data store is configured to coordinate with a data ingestion and transformation engine to extract, transform, and load the data, wherein the data ingestion and transformation engine facilitates both batch file loading of encrypted files from data providers and processing of streaming events from the data providers, wherein the data providers comprise (i) the at least one public-cloud server and (ii) the at least one private on-premise server.
Padbidri, however, discloses (¶0089-0103; FIG. 5) “a cloud native ETL module (CNETLM)” (data ingestion and transformation engine) that is configured to extract, transform, and load the data, wherein the data ingestion and transformation engine facilitates both batch file loading of(streaming/real-time data) from the data providers, wherein the data providers comprise (i) the at least one public-cloud server and (ii) the at least one private on-premise server.
“cloud native ETL module (CNETLM)…configured to fetch the desired data from the one or more data sources, e.g., real time/streaming source 502 and/or the batch source 504, based on the configuration details data to be utilized for the desired data processing scheme…sources and targets 602 can be on premises or cloud based (¶0090-0091)…may be further configured to implement a common code base for executing ETL across both the batch processing mode and the real time processing mode” (¶0103).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art prior to the filing date of the invention to modify Nawrocke data transfer to the platform cache to employ Padbidri’s CNETLM to facilitate user-friendly configuration for transferring data from diverse sources following a uniform configuration (Padbidri ¶0051, 0102).
Nawrocke/Padbidri does not describe characteristics of the underlying data content and does not specify that it is encrypted.
Gilmartin, however, discloses an analogous “ETL process extracts data from outside sources, then transforms it to fit the needs of the overall system, then loads it into the end target (most preferably a database)” (¶0056); and further discloses (¶0060-0061, 0078-0079) the ETL process supports batch file loading of encrypted files from data providers, “a copy of the encrypted file is created and kept in a separate FTP archive location, not shown in drawings. The system will decrypt the file, 323, and start data validation…final processed data is stored in the SQL “CRXProd” database” (¶0060).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art prior to the filing date of the invention to modify Nawrocke/Padbidri to handle encrypted files as taught by Gilmartin to increase data security and integrity (Gilmartin ¶0071-0075).
Claims 12 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Nawrocke et al. (US 2020/0356559 A1) in further view of Gilmartin (US 2015/0332422 A1).
Claim 12:
Nawrocke discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Nawrocke further discloses (¶0093, 0200-0202, 0122, 0141, 0033) wherein the redundantly storing comprises periodically performing batch file transfers (transferred a priori) from(updates/changes)
“Caching may be performed prior to receiving a query…The cached data may also be updated…in response to detecting a change in the version of the cached data in the source from which it was retrieved. Evaluating of whether a cached table is different from the version of the table at the source from which it is retrieved may be performed…periodically, or in response to detecting writing of data to that table on the source” (¶0200-0201).
Nawrocke does not describe characteristics of the underlying data content and does not specify that it is encrypted.
Gilmartin, however, discloses an analogous “ETL process extracts data from outside sources, then transforms it to fit the needs of the overall system, then loads it into the end target (most preferably a database)” (¶0056); and further discloses (¶0060-0061, 0078-0079) the ETL process supports batch file transfers from encrypted files from data providers, “a copy of the encrypted file is created and kept in a separate FTP archive location, not shown in drawings. The system will decrypt the file, 323, and start data validation…final processed data is stored in the SQL “CRXProd” database” (¶0060).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art prior to the filing date of the invention to modify Nawrocke/Padbidri to handle encrypted files as taught by Gilmartin to increase data security and integrity (Gilmartin ¶0071-0075).
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant’s disclosure:
“Technology Mapping of Layers in a Scalable Distributed Architecture for Big Data Processing” is directed to an ingestion system supporting both batch and streaming.
US 20190190921 A1 discloses privacy policies for data source query execution.
Each of the following are directed to optimizing data source selection: US 20240275869 A1; US 11645282 B1; US 20200272636 A1; US 20170061007 A1.
US 11308114 B1 is directed to data access from hybrid cloud sources.
US 20160275130 A1 is directed to aggregating temporal data from multiple overlapping sources
“QETL: An approach to on-demand ETL from non-owned data sources” discloses an on-demand ETL process.
“A PGSA Based Data Replica Selection Scheme for Accessing Cloud Storage System” is directed to replica selection.
Any inquiry of a general nature or relating to the status of this application or concerning this communication or earlier communications from the Examiner should be directed to Paul Mills whose telephone number is 571-270-5482. The Examiner can normally be reached on Monday-Friday 11:00am-8:00pm. If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the Examiner’s supervisor, April Blair can be reached at 571-270-1014.
Examiner interviews are available via telephone, in-person, and video conferencing using a USPTO supplied web-based collaboration tool. To schedule an interview, applicant is encouraged to use the USPTO Automated Interview Request (AIR) at http://www.uspto.gov/interviewpractice.
Information regarding the status of published or unpublished applications may be obtained from Patent Center. Unpublished application information in Patent Center is available to registered users. To file and manage patent submissions in Patent Center, visit: https://patentcenter.uspto.gov. Visit https://www.uspto.gov/patents/apply/patent-center for more information about Patent Center and https://www.uspto.gov/patents/docx for information about filing in DOCX format. For additional questions, contact the Electronic Business Center (EBC) at 866-217-9197 (toll-free). If you would like assistance from a USPTO Customer Service Representative, call 800-786-9199 (IN USA OR CANADA) or 571-272-1000.
/P. M./
Paul Mills
01/29/2026
/APRIL Y BLAIR/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2196