ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,298,961, issued on May 13, was assigned to Amazon Technologies Inc. (Seattle).

"Increasing commit times at database shards for implementing consistency and isolation for distributed transactions" was invented by Jin Chen (Toronto), Anand Kumar Thakur (Snohomish, Wash.), Upendra Govindagowda (Renton, Wash.), Gaurav Kumar Gupta (Waterloo, Canada), David Charles Wein (Shoreline, Wash.), Saleem Mohideen (Saratoga, Calif.) and Alexandre Olegovich Verbitski (Woodinville, Wash.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Clock times may be stored at nodes of a database system that are used to provide access to database data using Multi-Version Concurrency C...