Patent ID: 7797312

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of interrogating a database comprising a plurality of tables stored in a computer memory, said method comprising the steps of: generating a database query and a data map, said data map describing a tree structure of table instances associated with said database query, wherein each node of said tree structure, apart from the root node thereof, has a label providing a table path section, and said root node has no such label, and a table path stored in the table path section for a given node describes a path found by traversing the tree structure from the root node to the given node; submitting said database query to said database, said database executing in a computer system; receiving a response from said database, said response from said database responsive to said database query; traversing said data map so as to iteratively apply a data extraction process to components of said response corresponding to each table instance associated with said database query, thereby extracting required data from said response.