ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 30 -- United States Patent no. 12,748,757, issued on Sept. 29, was assigned to Snowflake Inc. (Bozeman, Mont.).
"Runtime pruning for top K queries" was invented by Jonathan Christian Nitisastro (San Mateo, Calif.) and Zhaohui Zhang (Redwood City, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A top K query directed at a table is received. Run-time pruning is performed during execution of the top K query on the table. The run-time pruning comprises determining, by a top K node, a current boundary based on a set of values identified by a table scan node in scanning the table and applying, by the table scan node, the current boundary to prune data during the scanning of the table. ...