Patent ID: 7058622

Claim:
A method for controlling access to database information, comprising: receiving a database query directed to a database engine; initially evaluating at least one system performance characteristic associated with at least one database engine, selected from one or more of: system management parameters of said at least one database engine, said system management parameters comprising one or more of estimated processor usage, estimated memory usage, input/output resource usage and/or disk resource usage for a system maintaining the database engine to process the query; a user-access record of said at least one database engine, said user-access record comprising an assigned accessibility right of a user based on a class or category of a user, historical system resource requirements of the user's previous queries and the user's previously evaluated queries; and the query to determine system usage of said at least one database engine, prior to submission of the query to the database engine, said evaluating of the database query based on one or more of: a parameter of the query, a number of relational databases for the query, a size of a data field to be searched for the query, an availability of resources of the database engine, a number of relational database tables to be employed for the query, a limitation imposed on a size of a query result set, a number of columns of data to be returned in a query result set, a cost of a similar stored query and/or a number of function calls for the query; and rejecting the query if the system usage surpasses a threshold value.