Patent ID: 8843460

Claim:
A method for updating a production database concurrently used by one or more software applications, the method comprising: in response to receiving an update request, requesting the issuance of a unique identifier associated to a draft state version of a plurality of updates to the production database while keeping the plurality of updates invisible to the at least one software application, wherein the production database includes a plurality of product items and occupies more than one terabyte or contains more than a billion rows, the product items comprising fares, rules applying to fares, and routes associated to fares; within the production database, creating or copying from the production database a set of product items to be updated and validated, the set of product items to be updated and validated being identified by the unique identifier and being gathered as a meta-product stored at the production database on which the plurality of updates is applied, wherein the meta-product is a logical grouping by the unique identifier of the set of product items to be updated and validated; updating the product items of the meta-product based on the plurality of updates and setting the meta-product to a draft updated state; validating the updated product items of the draft updated state of the meta-product with at least one form of validation; and in response to successfully validating the updated product items of the meta-product with the at least one form of validation, setting the meta-product from the draft updated state to a production state such that the updated product items of the meta-product become immediately visible and useable at the production database by the at least one software application.