ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,493,632, issued on Dec. 9, was assigned to Veeva Systems Inc. (Pleasanton, Calif.).

"Systems and methods for querying hierarchically-structured data from a database" was invented by Marius K. Mortensen (Burlington, Canada), Asaf Roll (Richmond Hill, Canada), Justin Yuping Lai (Markham, Canada) and Yui To Wong (Toronto).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method for querying hierarchical data from a first database including receiving first hierarchical data associated with a first version and storing the first hierarchical data in the first database of the provider computing system. The method includes receiving a request to generate a query s...