Patent ID: 7765239

Claim:
In a computer system comprising a processing unit and memory and in which an object that is an instance of a user defined type comprising a plurality of fields is persisted in a database stored in said memory, wherein the data of at least one field of the object is stored in said memory outside of the database as a file within a file system of the computer system and the other fields of the object are stored within the database, and wherein the file that contains the data of said at least one field can be accessed either via the database or via an application programming interface of the file system, a computer-implemented method comprising: intercepting, by a component executing on said processing unit, a call from an application to the application programming interface of the file system to open the file in which the data of said at least one field of the object is stored in said memory, wherein the call identifies the field of the object by its identity within the database; determining, by said component executing on said processing unit, from the database whether the application has permission to access the data of the field of the object identified in said call; and invoking, by said component executing on said processing unit, the application programming interface of the file system to open the file only if the application has permission to do so.