One embodiment of the invention employs "transparent object persistence" techniques in which persistent data objects (i.e., the objects that represent persistent data from a database) are separated from business processing objects (i.e., the objects that handle the requests, process specific business operations, manipulate the persistent data and respond to clients). Within a Java 2 Enterprise Edition ("J2EE") environment, the business processing objects are entity beans managed by an Enterprise Java Bean ("EJB") container. A persistence manager manages the persistent data objects, which provide an in-memory representation of a set of database data. The entity beans manipulate the persistent data by invoking get/set accessor methods on the persistent data objects. In one embodiment, the persistence manager associates a state with each of the persistent data objects which indicates an operation to be performed within tables of a relational database when the modifications to the persistent data objects are committed to the relational database.