Patent ID: 7958083

Claim:
A method of summarizing data from a source table, comprising: providing a first and a second summarization processes, the first summarization process programmed to operate on substantially all data existing in the source table during execution of the first summarization process, the second summarization process programmed to operate on a first subset of data existing in the source table during execution of the second summarization process, an order of execution of the processes being permutable, and wherein the source table includes a volume of data; determining a scope of summarization in response to receiving a request to summarize data from the source table, each record of data in the source table including a summary identifier corresponding to a data event, the scope of summarization including at least one of a set of the summary identifiers in the source table and an operation to filter the summary identifiers, wherein the scope of the summarization is based on the volume of data included in the source table; obtaining a lock on data in the source table within the scope of summarization; selecting one of the first and second summarization processes to summarize the data based at least in part upon the volume of data being sufficiently large; extracting the data from the source table within the scope of summarization and summarizing the extracted data using the selected summarization process; and extracting the first subset of the data using the previously unselected summarization process, wherein the summarization processes utilize separate corresponding persistent storage approaches, and wherein the summarization processes are configured to operate concurrently on the source table without interfering with each summarization process's operation.