Abstract: Methods, systems and computer program products are provided for providing information in the form of an insertion to a user during delays in retrieving program material with an interactive system. This may include making a determination of whether the delay is going to be sufficiently long to provide the user with an insertion. In addition, the insertion may be customized to either the user or to the program material requested, or to both the user and the requested program material. The insertion may include control logic that provides the user with control over the insertion and/or the interactive system.

Abstract: A computer implemented method for minimizing the grant of pages locks and the number of outstanding locks while ensuring consistency of the copies of pages resident among a first, and a second data cache with the original pages in shared external storage. A first processor requesting a lock on a designated page is granted a lock over the group of pages including the designated page in the absence of a concurrent lock to the page or group held by another processor. Any changed page is copied through to external storage. Otherwise, a processor intending to alter a page causes a global lock manager to notify concurrent lock holders, invalidate copies of the page in their local caches, and obtain an exclusive lock to the requesting process for the duration of its operation on the page. After this the lock is demoted to share and the changed page also copied through to external storage.

Abstract: A computer-implemented method for the name-oriented accessing of files having at least zero records, any access path to files and records through an external store coupling the computer being defined by a pair of related directories. A first directory of record entries is sorted on a two-part token. The token consists of a unique sequence number assigned to the record and the sequence number of any parent record entry. Each record entry includes the token, file or record name, and external store address or pointer A traverse through the tokens constitutes a leaf-searchable B-tree.Rapid access to target records is by way of a name-sorted, inverted directory of names and tokens as a subset and which is reconstitutable from the first directory in the event of unavailability.

Abstract: A method to manage the access of data or pages mapped into a very large virtual external address space through a cache without disturbing the logical view of the data and without having to assign physical or real backing store to said logical view. A data cache is used in which pages are indexed according to a logical address intermediate to their virtual address and their physical location in external storage. Pages common to two or more files are updated in place in the cache, while pages bound to only one file are shadow copied.