Semantic processor for a hardware database management system

• US 20060095900A1
• Filed: 08/26/2004
• Published: 05/04/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 08/26/2004
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: InfiniDB, Inc.
• Original Assignee: InfiniDB, Inc.
• Inventors: Zhu, Zhixuan, Petersen, Frederick R.
• Application Number:
  US10/927,355
• Publication Number:
  US 20060095900A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 717/142
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 8/427 Parsing
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 8/433 Dependency analysis; Data or control flow analysis

Abstract

A semantic processor for a hardware database management system is described that is operable to take statements in a standardized language and parse those statements. The semantic processor includes a tokenizer for separating the statement into its individual elements and identifying keywords and operators. A precedence engine then orders the elements of the statement into the proper execution order and a function compiler creates an execution tree and determines which element are free of dependencies and can be executed.

Claims

1. A semantic processor for parsing structured language statements comprising:

a tokenizer receiving the incoming statements and separating the statement into its individual elements and identifying operators in the statements, wherein the tokenizer replaces each operator with a corresponding code; and

a precedence engine operable to take the operators from the tokenizer and order the operators according to their relative precedence.

2. The semantic processor of claim 1 further comprising a function compiler, the execution compiler taking the output of the precedence engine and creating an execution tree.

3. The semantic processor of claim 1 wherein the tokenizer also identifies non-operator strings in the statements, stores the strings in memory, and associates a pointer with the string.

4. The semantic processor of claim 1 wherein structured language statements are database queries.

5. The semantic processor of claim 4 wherein the database queries use Structured Query Language.

6. The semantic processor of claim 4 wherein the database queries use eXtensible Markup Language.

7. The semantic processor of claim 1 further comprising a keyword reduce function which is operable to substitute hard-coded instructions for keywords.

8. The semantic processor of claim 1 wherein the tokenizer compares each character in the incoming statement against a state memory holding potential keywords for the structured statement.

9. The semantic processor of claim 1 further comprising a linker operable to take the results from the precedence engine and create a link list for the statement.

10. A method for parsing a structured language statement in hardware, the method comprising:

separating individual elements of the statement into discrete objects;

identifying which of the discrete objects represent operators and keywords;

determining the relative precedence for each operator and keyword in the statement; and

creating an execution tree for the statement.

11. The method of claim 10 further where the separating and identifying are performed by a tokenizer.

12. The method of claim 10 wherein the determining is performed by a precedence engine having a rules table.

13. The method of claim 12 wherein the structured language is a standardized database language.