Patent ID: 7836100

Claim:
A system to manage data, the system comprising: a database system configured to manage operations associated with the data and other information, the database system including a number of operational layers to operate and use: an expression associated with a calculated column data structure which is included as part of a database table, a depth-first search of a reverse dependency mapping associated with each calculated column, and a serialized format that corresponds with the calculated column data structure and an operational layer to interpret metadata to recognize a calculated column, including error information, a last update time, a result size, and a calculated value, wherein one of the number of operational layers is used to maintain a list of dependencies associated with the calculated column data structure; an expression service component configured to evaluate the expression and provide a result and other information associated with the result and expression, an evaluation based in part on parsing the expression into tokens to check that the tokens reference valid columns and to pass certain tokens to the database system to check correspondence with recognized functions; and, a storage to store the result and information associated with the result.