Technique for generating views of archived business data

A computing system comprising:

• at least one hardware processor;
• at least one memory coupled to the at least one hardware processor;
• and
• one or more computer readable storage media storing computer-executable instructions that, when executed, cause the computing system to perform operations comprising:
• retrieve a business object definition from a business object repository, wherein said definition comprises at least one header table and metadata related to a schema of said header table;
• search a relational database for a primary key candidate column in a table, wherein a primary key candidate column is characterized by only containing content which has unique and non-null values for each row;
• iterate through a plurality of rows of said table and within each row iteration iterate through a set of character offsets comprised in an iterated cell of said primary key candidate column;
• for each of said iterated character offsets, read an associated character value and add said character value to a regular expression, wherein said regular expression is constructed in such a way that it will match a string if said string has one value at each character offset position which is a value which has also been observed with values comprised in said primary key candidate column at a same offset position,
• iterate through a plurality of non-header tables in said database and within a table iteration iterate through a set of comprised columns and for each column iteration test said regular expression on one or more rows associated with an iterated column of said non-header table;
• and
• on the condition that one of said regular expression tests returns true:
• mark a column associated with said true-returning regular expression test as a foreign key candidate of said primary key candidate column.