A system, method, computer program and article of manufacture for sharing metadata among cursors is provided. A metadata object marked as a versioned object can have multiple versions. Program units can share these versions of object metadata as opposed to copying the non-versioned object metadata into their memory. These program units may contain a pointer to an object's metadata but are otherwise void of the metadata information for the object. A locking protocol for the metadata ensures concurrency control and triggers dependency tracking. A locking protocol for the cursors controls cursor dependency status.