Markus Wanner wrote:
> On 07/20/2010 09:05 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>> Hmm, deriving code from a paper published by IBM sounds like bad news --
>> who knows what patents they hold on the techniques there?
>
> Yeah, that might be an issue. Note, however, that the lock-based
> variant differs substantially from what's been published. And I sort
> of doubt their patents covers a lot of stuff that's not lock-free-ish.
There's a fairly good mapping of what techniques are patented and which
were only mentioned in research in the Sun dynamic memory patent at
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7328316.html ; that mentions an earlier
paper by the author of the technique Markus is using, but this was from
before that one was written. It looks like Sun has a large portion of
the patent portfolio in this area, which is particularly troublesome now.
--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg@2ndQuadrant.com www.2ndQuadrant.us