Amazon Assigned Two Patents

Logical deletion of stored data objects
Amazon Technologies, Inc., Reno, NV, has been assigned a patent (8,996,831) developed by McHugh, Jason G., Seattle, WA, Gattu, Praveen Kumar, Redmond, WA, Ten-Pow, Michael A., and Denny-Brown, II, Derek Ernest, Seattle, WA, for a “system and method for logical deletion of stored data objects.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”Systems and methods for providing object versioning in a storage system may support the logical deletion of stored objects. In response to a delete operation specifying both a user key and a version identifier, the storage system may permanently delete the specified version of an object having the specified key. In response to a delete operation specifying a user key, but not a version identifier, the storage system may create a delete marker object that does not contain object data, and may generate a new version identifier for the delete marker. The delete marker may be stored as the latest object version of the user key, and may be addressable in the storage system using a composite key comprising the user key and the new version identifier. Subsequent attempts to retrieve the user key without specifying a version identifier may return an error, although the object was not actually deleted.“

The patent application was filed on July 29, 2013 (13/953,447).

Replicated storage of structured data records
Amazon Technologies, Inc., Reno, NV, has been assigned a patent (8,996,482) developed by Singh, Rahul, Seattle, WA, Geller, Alan S., Redmond, WA, and Agarwal, Amit J., Bellevue, WA, for a “distributed system and method for replicated storage of structured data records.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A distributed system and method for replicated storage of structure data records. According to one embodiment, a system may include storage hosts each configured to store and retrieve structured data records, and a data store manager configured to receive a request from a client to store a structured data record within a table. In response to receiving the request, the data store manager may be further configured to map the structured data record to a block according to a partition key value of the structured data record and an identifier of the table and to map the block to a subset comprising at least two of the plurality of storage hosts. Upon successfully storing the structured data record to the block within at least two storage hosts within the subset, the data store manager may be further configured to return to the client an indication that said request is complete.“

The patent application was filed on February 10, 2006 (11/352,461).