Patent ID: 8321481

Claim:
A method of organizing a data structure stored in a computer-readable memory, the data structure comprising a plurality of data blocks, wherein the data structure comprises a first data item which is to be deleted or is no longer needed, and wherein the first data item occupies a first set of data blocks, the method comprising: marking a data block assigned to a tag field of the first data item with an indicator to identify the first data item as no longer in use, wherein the first set of data blocks further comprise a data block assigned to a length field and at least one data block assigned to at least one value field for the first data item; identifying a second data item occupying a second set of data blocks adjacent to the first set of data blocks within the data structure, wherein the second data item comprises a tag field, a length field, and at least one value field, each of which are assigned to at least one data block in the second set of data blocks; copying a value from a data block assigned to a first value field of the second data item to a data block assigned to a first value field of the first data item such that a value previously stored in the data block assigned to the first value field of the first data item is replaced with the value from the data block assigned to the first value field of the second data item; repeating the copying step until all values from data blocks assigned to all value fields of the second data item have been copied to data blocks assigned to value fields of the first data item; determining that values from data blocks assigned to all value fields of the second data item have been copied to data blocks assigned to value fields of the first data item; replacing a value in the data block assigned to the length field of the first data item with a value in the data block assigned to the length field of the second data item; and replacing a value in the data block assigned to the tag field of the first data item with a value in the data block assigned to the tag field of the second data item.