Apple Inc.

Jonathan Thatcher

Clay Maeckel

Murali Vemulapati

James Qiu

Frank Lu

Erwin Hom

Robert Parks

Alex Chen

Carl Wang

Terrence Barwegen

Methods, program products, and systems for checkpoint based progressive backup are described. When a system receives a request to update a page of a storage device storing database files of a database, the system can update the page and replicate the updated page in a shadow page in a backup queue. The backup queue can store multiple shadow pages, where each updated page can correspond to at most a specified number of shadow pages in the queue. Each shadow page can be associated with a timestamp of a latest update. At pre-specified temporal checkpoints, the system can write the shadow pages in the queue to a backup file in the order of the timestamps. Upon receiving a restoration request, the system can restore the database to a state as of the time of the checkpoint using the backup file.

Checkpoint based progressive backup

Methods, program products, and systems for monitoring extrinsic processes are described. A monitoring process can monitor one or more target processes. The target processes can be extrinsic, e.g., not spawned by the monitoring process. The monitoring process reads a process registry to identify which processes among multiple processes to monitor. The monitoring process can send status requests to the identified target processes periodically to check whether the target processes are healthy. If a target process is terminated, the monitoring process determines whether the termination is normal (e.g., by a user), or abnormal (e.g., the target process crashed). The monitoring process can restart the abnormally terminated or hung target process.

Managing extrinsic processes

Improved techniques for implementing Network Copy Protection for database programs are disclosed. The techniques can provide Network Copy Protection across various platforms and/or connection protocols. Accordingly, the database programs can detect unlicensed use of the software even when different platforms and/or connection protocols are used by two instances (software copies) of the same database program. When unlicensed use of software is detected, access to data can be denied. As will be appreciated, in addition to supporting more conventional communication protocols, more prevalent connection protocols can be supported.

Network copy protection for database programs

Growing community of inventors

Mountain View, CA, United States of America

Jonathan Thatcher