Patent Document ID: 9734178
Application ID: 14698622

Base Claim:
1. A method comprising: identifying, for multiple entities and multiple keys stored in a data structure in a data storage unit, multiple entity-key associations, wherein at least some of the entity-key associations includes an entity and a key that are associated with each other; creating, for each of the entity-key associations, an entity-key association string by concatenating an entity identification (ID) of the entity in the entity-key association with a key ID of the key in the entity-key association, to produce multiple entity-key association strings; creating a first in-memory object in a computer system to store the entity-key association strings, the entity-key association strings representing the entity-key associations; and performing a search using the first in-memory object to retrieve at least one of (i) an entity-key association of the multiple entity-key associations, or (ii) an association value of the entity-key association.

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Claim 5:
5. The method of claim 1 , wherein at least some of the entity-key associations have corresponding association values.