Apple Inc.

Shui Wing Lo

Steven J Szymanski

Tantek I Celik

David J Austin

Jed Harris

Kurt W Piersol

Craig Carper

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.

Method of managing a data structure for concurrent serial and parallel

Storage manager for computer system

In a system which permits different components of a document to be linked, a unique token is associated with a change to data in the source of a link. The token is passed with a command to update linked data. Each destination object keeps track of the token associated with the last change made to its linked data. When a new command to update linked data arrives at the destination object, the token for that update is compared with the token for the previous update. If the tokens are the same, an alert is presented to the user to indicate that either the change has been propagated around a cycle, or more than one update path exists between the source object and the destination object. In response, the user can elect to prevent the change from being carried out in the destination object, in which case the cycle is broken. Alternatively, the user can elect to let the update continue, for example in those situations in which multiple update paths are desirable.

System for automatically detecting cyclical and recursive links between

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 can be Values, each of which has a Basic Type and consists of a variable length sequence of bytes. The Basic Type can define 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 can associate respective Container Handlers which are specific to the Container's physical medium. Related Blops in a Container can be organized into Pools of Blops. Each Container may contain one or more Pools, each Pool having a unique name within the Container. A Pool may contain multiple versions of a Blop. Versions of different Blops may be grouped together in Layers in a Pool and each Layer can contain 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 provide a mechanism to manipulate which versions of which Blops are to be used at any given time.

Layered storage structure for computer data storage manager

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Sunnyvale, CA, United States of America

Shui Wing Lo