A system and method are provided for interacting with a persistence layer. In an embodiment, a persistence layer may receive a representation of Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) metadata. The persistence layer may determine whether the representation of Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) metadata is compatible with a version of the EJB specification. In an embodiment, a representation of an Object-Relational (OR) mapping schema may be generated based, at least in part, on the representation of EJB metadata.