Patent US 6,654,868

Conventional information storage systems are subject to numerous practical constraints such as contiguity in the physical locations of blocks and the requirement that storage blocks be created in advance. Information retrieval in these systems has required the creation of indices, which take a long time to generate, and the structure of these systems makes them prone to deadlock because the indices are updated and the range of exclusion broadened when the referent information is modified. This invention utilizes the random access facilities of semiconductors to achieve high speeds and minimize the maintenance load. This invention introduces location tables and alternate-key tables to replace these indices. It also stores multiple records in a single block and can handle variable-length records and spanned records. The location tables manage the storage blocks. An alternate-key block is made up of a substitute key and its block number and the primary key value, either of which may be used to retrieve a target record by searching this table. Binary search is a well-known high-speed method of querying tables, but other methods may be used as well.