Splunk Assigned Patent

Splunk Inc., San Francisco, CA, has been assigned a patent (8,990,245) developed by Zhang, Steve Yu, and Sorkin, Stephen Phillip, San Francisco, CA, for a “determination and display of the number of unique values for a field defined for events in a distributed data store.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A method, system, and processor-readable storage medium are directed towards generating a report derived from data, such as event data, stored on a plurality of distributed nodes. In one embodiment the analysis is generated using a ‘divide and conquer’ algorithm, such that each distributed node analyzes locally stored event data while an aggregating node combines these analysis results to generate the report. In one embodiment, each distributed node also transmits a list of event data references associated with the analysis result to the aggregating node. The aggregating node may then generate a global ordered list of data references based on the list of event data references received from each distributed node. Subsequently, in response to a user selection of a range of global event data, the report may dynamically retrieve event data from one or more distributed nodes for display according to the global order.“

The patent application was filed on January 17, 2014 (14/158,421).