the invention is a database adapter providing improved methods for storing and retrieving relational data . suitable source data is structured as a table with a fixed number of columns of predetermined types and a variable number of rows . the invention reduces the space and time used to store data and the time taken to retrieve stored data . the invention is best implemented inside object relational database systems , but can also be implemented in any database that can execute routines written in programming languages such as c #, c or java . functionally , the invention combines the concept of nested tables with fast compression techniques so that nested tables are practical for solving a wide class of problems .