Techniques are described herein for maintaining two copies of the same semi-structured data, where each copy is organized in a different format. One copy is in a first-format that may be convenient for storage, but inefficient for query processing. For example, the first-format may be a textual format that needs to be parsed every time a query needs to access individual data items within a semi-structured object. The database system intelligently loads semi-structured first-format data into volatile memory and, while doing so, converts the semi-structured first-format data to a second-format. Because the data in volatile memory is in the second-format, processing queries against the second-format data both allows disk I/O to be avoided, and increases the efficiency of the queries themselves. For example, the parsing that may be necessary to run a query against a cached copy of the first-format data is avoided.