The present invention generally is directed to a system, method and article of manufacture for generating a data repository abstraction (DRA) component that may be used to access data independent of the particular manner in which the data is physically represented. In one embodiment, a DRA generator identifies a set of logical field candidates for possible use in generating the DRA component. The DRA generator may then generate the DRA component with a subset of the logical field candidates determined by a weighting algorithm based on usage information collected from available database schema and associated objects.