Techniques for executing show commands are described herein. A plurality of navigation steps is utilized, each navigation step corresponding to a different layer in a database structure and each navigation step including an operator to fetch items from a metadata database up to respective bounded limits. Dependency information is also fetched for objects of the specified object type in the show command. After a set of objects from the last layer are processed, memory for the navigation steps is flushed and the next set of objects are processed.