Abstract: Exploiting parallelism is the key to building high performance database systems. Several approaches to building database systems that support both inter and intra-query parallelism have been proposed. These approaches can be classified as either Shared Nothing (SN) or Shared Everything (SE). Although the SN approach is highly scalable, it requires complete data partitioning and tuning to achieve good performance whereas the SE approach suffers from non scalability. We propose a scalable sharing approach which combines the advantages of both SN and SE. Requirements to parallel database systems are formulated, which serve as criteria for comparing various architectures. We analyze the performance of our approach and compare with that of a SN and SE system. We find that our approach performs better than that of SN and SE approaches.