The Datastore stores data collected from citizens during online screening and intake of applications. The contents of the datastore are dynamically definable by way of a datastore schema definition. Other dynamically definable components depend on the Datastore Schema, in particular screening and intake scripts, and screening rules, so the datastore contents must be kept compatible with these. In particular, these other components may depend on certain fixed elements of Datastore definitions, which must therefore exist in order for these components to operate properly.
Data on the Datastore is stored in XML format. For reasons of efficiency, the data for a single application is shredded across multiple database rows so that updates to an application during intake do not result in large amounts of inefficient LOB I/O every time a page of an intake script is traversed. Each type of shredded row content is called a datastore entity. The datastore schema definition conforms to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XML Schema Definition Language. In addition to having to conform to the W3C specification, a datastore schema must follow certain datastore-specific rules. These are described in Creating a Datastore Schema.