STORING AND RETRIEVING OBJECTS ON A COMPUTER NETWORK IN A DISTRIBUTED DATABASE

A distributed, object-oriented database engine utilizing independent, intelligent processing nodes as a cooperative, massively parallel system with redundancy and fault tolerance. Instead of using traditional methods of parallelism as found in most distributed databases, the invention utilizes a messaging system and a series of message processing nodes to determine where objects and data associated with objects are stored. The architecture is loosely coupled, each node independently determining if it manages or routes storage and retrieval requests.