Time-Series Database patented by GE

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=9087098.PN.&OS=PN/9087098&RS=PN/9087098

by rodionos • 11 years ago

81 52 11 years ago

patft.uspto.gov

easytiger3• 11 years ago

I remember trolling the linked list patent people 10+ years ago. I sent them an email saying my software made extensive uses of linked lists and it had come to my attention that they had patented them. They sent me to their legal department to arrange an agreement.

Insane.

I wonder how influxdb et al will receive this news.

Here is the list of people who should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves:

Lin; Jerry (Latham, NY), Aggour; Kareem Sherif (Niskayuna, NY), Courtney; Brian Scott (Naperville, IL), Interrante; John Alan (Scotia, NY), LaComb; Christina Ann (Schenectady, NY), Mathur; Sunil (East Walpole, MA), McConnell; Christopher Thomas (Latham, NY), Snell; Quinn (Salem, UT)

dozzie• 11 years ago

Pretty much in no way whatsoever. RRDtool as a prior art example.

kbody• 11 years ago

kdb as well, I would imagine them having some kind of patent.

thanatropism• 11 years ago

So I don't know the first thing about software patents, but most central banks (including the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, etc.) -- offer web interfaces for manipulating and retrieving economic time-series (say, taking logarithms, adjusting for inflation or PPP, etc). Does this count as "prior art"?

The European Council also has a large, useful system called Eurostat.

moron4hire2• 11 years ago

Unfortunately, USPTO only considers other patents or academic papers as prior art.

danieltillett3• 11 years ago

While I in no way agreeing with this decision why are these people responsible for the terrible decision of the USPTO? They just get to apply for a patent, not issue one. The employee(s) at the USPTO that approved this patent are the ones that should be ashamed.

jarcane2• 11 years ago

Because flooding the USPTO with an unending flow of bogus patents are partly why those same patents get approved. They're taking part of a system that takes advantage of an underfunded and understaffed agency in order to profit from it in the long term, knowing that they will get away with it for years and be able to milk millions through the courts long before anyone big enough shuts them down.

Patent trolling effectively begets more patent trolling, and everyone partaking of it should indeed be ashamed of themselves.

notahacker2• 11 years ago

Not everybody that patents a [generic description of] a system they're developing has any intention of doing anything other than protecting themselves from others' claims.

Aside: I had an interesting conversation a couple of months back with a guy who had a very broad patent on methods of operating a digital auction dating back to the early 2000s which as worded clashed with everything from Betfair to Priceline. He's still far more interested in building a consumer business once he can find people to run it and fund it rather than flogging it to a troll.

davelnewton5• 11 years ago

Bear in mind that sometimes the people on a patent listing aren't in favor of the idea being patented. A company I worked for started down the patent road for some processor emulation stuff I worked on; my name would have been on the patent even though I (a) didn't think it was patentable, and (b) didn't think it should be patented.

Because of the company's rules my name needed to be on the patent despite my objections.

phkahler2• 11 years ago

> Because of the company's rules my name needed to be on the patent despite my objections.

Then you had the ability to stop it.

throwawaykf052• 11 years ago

Trolling aside, the linked list patent doesn't cover what we think of as linked lists. We've had this conversation before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8231954

I don't see many folks here who've actually read the claims of this patent and analyzed them for validity. For all we know, this could be a legit difference over the art. But hey, claims are hard, let's go shopping. Or shame people, whatever.

If people want some chance of expert analysis, they should submit this to askpatents.com

easytiger3• 11 years ago

The uniqueness of a variant on a linked list which I imagine many people have reinvented with variance over the years, is not important. These debates are meaningless because creating a system penalising people for creating something that solves their own problems with no external reference is being made a crime and hurting business. I myself have worked for companies who have had to spend years in legal disputes for trolls. It has a real cost. These people are a cancer and this is a tax on abstract thought.

pauldix• 11 years ago

InfluxDB CEO here. I've already forwarded to our lawyers to ask. Reading through the patent there are some key differences between what they describe and what we built.

easytiger3• 11 years ago

Your probably fine but only because this is a company with a business. They aren't an IP litigation based business who would use it against you. The idea of incorporating business in north america frightens me. ITTP will make this a global problem.

_lbaq• 11 years ago

Well, this seems reasonable ......

chaotic-good• 11 years ago

We have used such systems in industrial control systems for decades. TSDB is integral part of any modern SCADA system. This patent is a nonsense.

ricksplat• 11 years ago

OLAP?

halayli• 11 years ago

In big corps, patent attorneys have quotas to fill. Usually they don't fully understand the technology but try to patent it anyway.

weddpros• 11 years ago

then pattent attorneys should pay for their crimes, or should be sued by their clients

patkai• 11 years ago

I can imagine that GE has big plans for improving services like condition monitoring for jet engines where they would sell monitoring data etc. If a competing startup tries to compete they have ammunition.

sedlich• 11 years ago

Nearly all DBs have timestamps. This patent is nonsense. Patent attorneys should also be payed for rejections.

DomreiRoam2• 11 years ago

Seems you can't sue the USPTO for issuing bad patents according to this[1]. But I think you should be compensated for the cost of a lawsuit based on bad patents.

[1] http://patentlyo.com/patent/2012/12/suing-the-uspto-for-issu...

jarcane2• 11 years ago

You can be, if the judge in the eventual suit decides in your favor for legal fees. But this can take years, and patent trolls big and small tend to deliberately target only those who can't really afford to fight them.

DomreiRoam2• 11 years ago

You right on this. I meant that the USPTO seems to have no incentive to stop bad patents. I don't think a small time inventor submitting an idea that seems novel for him should be punished when he tries to enforce this in good faith. USPTO should have the resources and the expertise to stop bad patent and when they fail they should compensate for the mess they create. They are played by NPE and big companies and don't defend the small inventor and the society in general. They fail their public mission.

fche• 11 years ago

A very quick skimming of the patent suggests that they are talking more about the online / distributed / dataflowish query evaluation engine than about a simple timestamped data storage widget. (Not that this makes it much more novel.)

elcct• 11 years ago

Sounds a bit like InfluxDB...

new1234567• 11 years ago

WOW! You can store time series in a database! This is an amazing invention!!!

TD-Linux• 11 years ago

To determine if you infringe this patent, you only need to look at the claims - specifically, the independent claims (claim 1). If you do anything differently, you don't infringe.

derf_• 11 years ago

Well, that is not quite true. You also need definitions for the words used in the claims, which may require reading the description to understand properly. But certainly the claims are where you start your analysis.

domfletcher• 11 years ago

It may be a bit of a liberal reading of it but doesn't the database that the patent is stored in on that page violate the patent? It certainly has date stamped data which is ingested and query-able...

colinbartlett• 11 years ago

Just wait for the next patent to be approved by USPTO: "Method of assigning exclusive rights to an inventor."

xntrk• 11 years ago

Who wants to file "Method of assigning exclusive rights to an inventor." with me?

ipsn• 11 years ago

During my tenure at GE, quite a few years ago, there was an intense company-wide drive to patent practically anything at all. We were given incentives to do so, of course. We were told that GE only uses patents defensively, i.e. for negotiations other companies. The incentives got many employees to patent industry-wide practices, or trivially simple stuff, or really convoluted methods that no one in their right minds will use anyway.

I haven't followed GE's track record closely after I got out, but I think they still live by that guideline. In any case, GE is not a software company, and it's unlikely they'd want to (or can) go after software companies on the basis of patents such as this one.

The patent system is broken, and GE is just another company, in a long list, that is abusing it for some reason. But so far, GE has given me little reason to believe they'll come after me for infringing on these kinds of patents.

rodionos• 11 years ago

That's what I'm hoping for as well. It would have been a completely different situation if this patent were granted to a non-practicing entity with a track record of litigating in the Eastern District of Texas.

If you search for other patents/patent applications by the same inventors, you get the picture, e.g.:http://patents.justia.com/inventor/kareem-sherif-aggour

bnastic• 11 years ago

So, if I, like many here I presume, built one of these time series databases long ago prior to this patent, and that "invention" is still active in real production systems, can I claim prior art?

jandrewrogers• 11 years ago

As someone who has designed a few large-scale time-series databases, I read the entire patent. It was filed in December 2012, long after I last did a clean room design, so pretty much everything I've done could be viewed as prior art. I would have to imagine Splunk has something to say about this too.

The primary claim of novelty in this patent is storing index block metadata on a separate server than the storage blocks. To the extent that pretty much every distributed time-series platform ever designed separates index block metadata from storage blocks, it does not reflect positively on the competency of the software team at GE that they think this is novel. (I realize that this may not have been the choice of the software team.)

Furthermore, in properly designed systems, these functions are separated at the granularity of a process rather than a server because it is more flexible and efficient. They can be implemented on separate servers, and usually are, but it is not a requirement because requiring it would be stupid. But if GE did not make this a requirement, I doubt it would have withstood even the nominal prior art search; that limitation on scope was needed to get it through.

Overall, the architecture of the time-series database implied in the patent is consistent with someone that learned their poor distributed system habits from the Hadoop ecosystem and decided to reinvent the time-series database without knowing much about how those systems actually work. However, I am not surprised this made it through the US patent system.

hbs• 11 years ago

Come on, stop your Hadoop hate speech, and simply bring SpaceCurve on the bandwagon against this patent.

Time-Series Database patented by GE

Related Stories