6. The method of claim 5 further comprising: creating a second in-memory object to store multiple association value IDs for the entity-key association strings in the first in-memory object, the association value IDs used to retrieve the association values of the entity-key associations represented by the entity-key association strings.
6. The method of claim 5 further comprising: creating a second in-memory object to store multiple association value IDs for the entity-key association strings in the first in-memory object, the association value IDs used to retrieve the association values of the entity-key associations represented by the entity-key association strings. 7. The method of claim 6 , wherein the second in-memory object is a metafile, the metafile including: a byte offset of a specified entity-key association string of the entity-key association strings in the first in-memory object, a specified association value ID for the specified entity-key association string, and a storage location from where an association value of a specified entity-key association represented by the specified entity-key association string is to be retrieved from using the specified association value ID.