ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 3 -- United States Patent no. 12,346,304, issued on July 1, was assigned to Oracle International Corp. (Redwood Shores, Calif.).

"Lock management for distributed application pods" was invented by Venkatachalam Rangasamy (Fremont, Calif.), Jaganathan Jeyapaul (Saratoga, Calif.), Jeffrey Trent (Medford, N.J.), Jay Hiremath (Tracy, Calif.), Senthilkumar Somasundaram (Fremont, Calif.), Krithika Bharathi Sundaram (Bangalore, India), Parvathy Unnikrishnan (Bangalore, India), Vijay Bhasker Mula (Reddy District, India) and Esha Sharma (Hayward, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Instances of an application pod may be deployed to many different computing environments spanning ...