Various technologies and techniques are disclosed that improve the retrieval or interaction with data in databases. A database has one or more tables with compound keys. An entity key that is a single composite key of each of the compound keys is generated via an invertible composition transformation. The composite entity key is a binary serialization of the respective compound keys. The composite entity key is used by separate applications to interact with the database instead of the respective underlying compound keys. The composite entity key is decomposed into the underlying compound keys when a particular database operation needs to be performed. The results are then returned to the separate application with the composite entity key.