ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,705,221, issued on Aug. 11, was assigned to Veeva Systems Inc. (Pleasanton, Calif.).

"Systems and methods for improved structured data duplication in a database" was invented by Drew Garty (Madison, Wis.), Raymond T. Letulle Jr. (Orinda, Calif.), Mark Johnson (Livermore, Calif.) and Lindsay Chan (Seattle).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Systems and methods for duplicating data in a data management system. As data is being updated in the data management system, a copy of the updated data is being written to a table for collecting the data changes. The data changes are flattened by a flattener to generate one or more flat files. A packaging ...