Shore has a layered architecture that allows users to choose the level of support appropriate for a particular application.

The Shore Storage Manager (SM) is a persistent object storage engine that supports creation of persistent files of records. Each record can be any size, with efficient storage of records from a few bytes to megabytes or larger. Records may be retrieved by object identifier or by scanning files. The SM provides full concurrency control and recovery (the so-called ACID properties) with two-phase locking and write-ahead logging. It also provides robust implementations of btrees and rtrees and record access through logical object identifiers. The SM is designed to be used as a library to create value-added servers tailored to specific applications.

The Shore Value-Added Server (SVAS) builds on the functionality of the SM to provide typed objects, a Unix-like directory namespace, access control, and a client-server architecture supporting object-level caching, transactional semantics, and security at the server boundary. The NFS value-added server fully implements the standard NFS (Network File Server) protocol, allowing legacy applications to access Shore objects as if they were Unix files.

The Shore Data Language (SDL), which is based on the Object Database Management Group (ODMG) ODL language, supports language-independent description of object-oriented data types. The SDL compiler compiles definitions into type objects stored in the database and C++ language stubs. The combination of the SDL compiler and an extensive run-time library allows programmers to write applications that manipulate objects through type-safe object references. The library takes care of fetching objects on demand to an LRU client-level object cache, flushing changes to the server on transaction commit, and swizzing and unswizzling references as necessary.