This paper contains a proposal to enhance a relational database manager to support document processing. Basically, it suggests support for data items that are variable-length strings, support for ordered relations, support for substring operations, and support for new operators that concatenate and break apart string fields.

In this paper we briefly present the design of a distributed relational data base system. Then, we discuss experimental observations of the performance of that system executing both short and long commands.Conclusions are also drawn concerning metrics that distributed query processing heuristics should attempt to minimize. Lastly, we comment on architectures which appear viable for distributed data base applications.