This chapter explains the ways that DBMSs utilize computer networks, remote computers, and remote data storage. Before understanding the details, you should understand the motivation for utilizing these resources. This chapter discusses the business reasons for client-server processing, parallel database processing, and distributed data. After grasping the motivation, you are ready to learn architectures for distributing different tasks in a client-server organization and dividing large amounts of work among resources using parallel database technology. Description of parallel database processing in Oracle and IBM DB2 complement the conceptual presentation. Distributing data in addition to distributing processing allows more flexibility but also involves more complexity. To depict the tradeoff between flexibility and complexity, this chapter explains distributed database architectures, levels of transparency for distributed data, and distributed database processing for queries and transactions. Examples of transparency for Oracle distributed databases complement the conceptual material.