A computer program product comprising instructions operable to cause one or more machines to result in operations comprising: generating a short identifier for each of a plurality of data objects from a respective composite component identifier associated with the corresponding data object, said composite component identifier comprising a concatenation of a plurality of components associated with the corresponding data object, each component having its own semantic meaning, wherein said short identifier is a fixed length byte array having a length smaller than the length of the respective composite component identifier and wherein each short identifier comprises a first portion consisting of bytes representing a sort order information, and a second portion consisting of bytes representing an ID information associated with the corresponding data object, wherein the second portion comprises a hash of at least a portion of the respective composite component identifier, and storing the generated short identifiers in a database to enable queries of the database containing a short identifier to return data contained within the corresponding data objects, wherein said generating comprises: mapping two or more of the plurality of components of the respective composite component identifier to bytes of the first portion of the short identifier in order ranging from most significant to least significant sort criterion; or mapping two or more of the plurality of components of the respective composite component identifier to bytes of the first portion of the short identifier according to a hierarchy of the components. generating a short identifier for each of a plurality of data objects from a respective composite component identifier associated with the corresponding data object, said composite component identifier comprising a concatenation of a plurality of components associated with the corresponding data object, each component having its own semantic meaning, wherein said short identifier is a fixed length byte array having a length smaller than the length of the respective composite component identifier and wherein each short identifier comprises a first portion consisting of bytes representing a sort order information, and a second portion consisting of bytes representing an ID information associated with the corresponding data object, wherein the second portion comprises a hash of at least a portion of the respective composite component identifier, and a first portion consisting of bytes representing a sort order information, and a second portion consisting of bytes representing an ID information associated with the corresponding data object, wherein the second portion comprises a hash of at least a portion of the respective composite component identifier, and storing the generated short identifiers in a database to enable queries of the database containing a short identifier to return data contained within the corresponding data objects, wherein said generating comprises: mapping two or more of the plurality of components of the respective composite component identifier to bytes of the first portion of the short identifier in order ranging from most significant to least significant sort criterion; or mapping two or more of the plurality of components of the respective composite component identifier to bytes of the first portion of the short identifier according to a hierarchy of the components. mapping two or more of the plurality of components of the respective composite component identifier to bytes of the first portion of the short identifier in order ranging from most significant to least significant sort criterion; or mapping two or more of the plurality of components of the respective composite component identifier to bytes of the first portion of the short identifier according to a hierarchy of the components.