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 3:
3. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the application, the database manager and the database reside on different computer systems.