Patent ID: 7945542

Claim:
A program storage device readable by a machine, tangibly embodying a program of instructions executable by the machine to perform a method for accessing hierarchical data stored in a memory, the method comprising: receiving a first command related to the hierarchical data, wherein the hierarchical data comprises a first data item having a dependency relationship with a second data item, and the first command references the first data item; determining whether the first command is a tracking command based upon information associated with the first command; responsive to determining that the first command is a tracking command, saving information regarding the first command in a dependency list, wherein the saved information includes a version number for the first data item; receiving a second command after receiving the first command; and responsive to determining that the second command is a command to commit changes to the hierarchical data: using said information from said dependency list to verify that a version number stored in a database for the first data item matches the version number saved in the dependency list for the first data item, and canceling the second command if the version number stored in the database does not match the version number saved in the dependency list.