ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,306,820, issued on May 20, was assigned to Veeva Systems Inc. (Pleasanton, Calif.).

"System and method for duplicating structured data in database" was invented by Peter Gassner (Pleasanton, Calif.), Jonathan Stone (Olympia, Wash.), Andrew Han (Needham, Mass.) and Brian Keith Caufield (Livermore, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Systems and methods for duplicating data in a data management system. As data is being updated in the data management system, a copy of the updated data is being written to a table for collecting the data changes. The data changes are flattened by a flattener to generate one or more flat files. A packaging c...