Patent ID: 7860879

Claim:
A method of populating and utilizing a data object tree corresponding to a database having a predefined schema that defines the database, the data object tree describing the database according to a number of levels of data objects, each data object in each level comprising metadata describing a corresponding element of the database, and having a known type of child data object in a next level, the method comprising: issuing a single query for each level of the data object tree with regard to every data object in the level to retrieve metadata from the database corresponding to every child data object of every data object in the level, the issued single query for a particular level being based on the known type of child data object of each data object in the particular level; storing the retrieved metadata as data in a table, wherein: the data is stored in the table in a predetermined order; and all objects of a same type are stored in a same table and are obtainable with a same query; reading the data from the table in the predetermined order; identifying a location of a data object in the data object tree that corresponds to the data read from the table; initializing the located data object with the read data; custom-generating a creation script using the initialized data object; applying the custom-generated creation script to recreate the schema of the database; and transferring metadata for the database from a development server to a production server in accordance with the recreated schema.