Patent ID: 7216127

Claim:
A method comprising organizing a byte stream of an information structure, said information structure having a schema and an in-memory representation, said schema having a schema tree representation with a plurality of schema nodes, said schema nodes including at least one leaf and at least one interior node, the step of organizing comprising the steps of: computing a layout from the schema tree representation depth-first enumeration of leaf nodes of the schema; serializing the byte stream from the in-memory representation while grouping together all scalar items from the in-memory representation corresponding to each schema node, wherein the step of serializing the byte stream further comprises the steps of: retrieving a location in the byte stream for an element of the in-memory representation corresponding to a first schema leaf node in depth first order from the layout; converting the element to bytes in the byte stream according to a number of elements corresponding to the schema leaf node, storing a result during said converting the element; and accessing information from the byte stream by using the layout and offset calculations, wherein the step of accessing information further comprises the steps of: scanning a list of key values representing a table column serialized within the byte stream to determine an index position; and using the index position in conjunction with offset calculations and offset tables serialized at the start of lists within the byte stream to find information in lists representing non-key table columns.