The present invention relates to a system and methodology to facilitated data object persistence. An object schema is utilized to provide metadata for types in addition to what is provided by the type system for an underlying programming language. This metadata is then utilized by the system to translate data to and from user objects during a materialization or persistence process. The object schema provides information external to programming logic and type definitions. Consequently, the object schema can be deployed independent of an application thereby allowing the persistence storage of user objects to change without force the user to recompile and deploy application code.