Patent Document ID: 8977601
Application ID: 12944505

Base Claim:
1. An apparatus comprising: a computer system comprising a processor coupled to a memory; an application executing in the memory with a first query and a subsequent query to a database; a database manager with a disappearing index mechanism to manage the database, wherein the disappearing index mechanism processes the first query with an initially full index and removes a value from the index with a corresponding pointer while processing the first query where the first query does not select a record, to create a sparse index for the subsequent query to the database; and wherein the disappearing index mechanism determines there are multiple pointers for a value in the index and removes pointers to the value in the full index that point to a record that is not selected and removes the value from the index where all the pointers point to records that are not selected.

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Claim 2:
2. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the initially full index comprises a hash table with keys grouped in buckets, and wherein the disappearing index mechanism removes the value from the initially full index by removing the keys from the buckets in the hash table for query operations that do not select a record.