Transaction Processing and Concurrency Patents: Who Leads and Where Claims Concentrate
50.1% concentration. The top five assignees together hold 261 of 521 records in scope — half the entire field sits with five companies. Annual filings moved from 31 in 2017 to a peak of 37 in 2022, then continued at a comparable pace, with 2021's 21 filings rising to 34 by 2024 — a 62% increase over that three-year span. 2025 and 2026 figures (3 filings recorded so far for 2026) are not yet complete due to publication lag and should not be read as a slowdown.
- 1SAP SE104
- 2INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINE CORPORATION46
- 3SNOWFLAKE INC46
- 4HUAWEI TECH CO LTD33
- 5TENCENT TECHNOLOGY (SHENZHEN) CO LTD32
See the full transaction processing and concurrency analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Common questions about this landscape
Who holds the most patents in transaction processing and concurrency control?
The dataset ranks 77 companies by record count, with the leading assignee holding 104 of the 521 records in scope — well ahead of the fifth-ranked company's 32. The top five assignees combined account for 50.1% of all records, and the top ten extend that to 67.9%. This is a field where a small number of established database and cloud-data vendors have built large, defensive filing programs, leaving a long tail of smaller filers with only a handful of records each.
Is patent filing in this space still growing?
Yes, based on complete years: filings rose from 21 in 2021 to 34 in 2024, a 62% increase, after peaking at 37 in 2022. Figures for 2025 and 2026 appear lower, but that reflects the roughly 18-month lag between filing and publication rather than an actual drop in activity. Anyone tracking this trend should wait for the next publication cycle before concluding the field is slowing.
What does snapshot isolation patent coverage actually protect?
Representative filings like US8396831B2 cover the mechanics of multiversion concurrency control — specifically, how a system validates the visibility of a transaction's read set and detects phantom rows by re-scanning for new versions before allowing a commit. Claims in this area typically cover the timestamp-based versioning scheme and the specific validation tests applied, rather than the general concept of snapshot isolation itself. Anyone implementing optimistic concurrency control should review how their commit-time validation logic compares to these specific mechanisms.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Transaction Processing and Concurrency covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.