COMPOSITE NESTED STREAMS

Reshaping of streams is provided to facilitate utilizing the streams without rapidly increasing memory requirements as the size of the stream increases. The streams can be pushed to alternative storage upon being reshaped, for example, such as to a persistent storage. If the streams lose structure, for example if a hierarchical stream is reshaped into a flat structure for storage in a database, structural information can be stored along with the streams and utilized to shape the stream to its original structure upon request for data, for example. Streams can be pulled from an exposing device or application, and portions of the stream can be transformed and stored according to a set of stop elements; the stop elements can be associated with functions that take action on the stream upon reaching a stop element, such as transforming and storing a portion thereof.