The invention provides an application programming mechanism and technique that makes referencing data look as if the data is dynamically allocated by the process. The invention also provides a mechanism whereby persisted data is shared across all processes on the same computer that access it. Small, process specific structures are created on demand as the program accesses the persisted data and makes use of the underlying memory mapping and linking technologies inherent in modern operation systems. The technique is especially useful in large data repositories where it simplifies the sharing of data between instances of an application, and also permits sharing of data between different applications. It allows for the data to be highly referenced internally while not requiring the extra memory used by pointer swizzling at runtime.