This document discusses parallel database architecture. It covers various types of parallelism including I/O parallelism, inter-query parallelism, and intra-query parallelism. It describes techniques for partitioning relations across multiple disks to enable I/O parallelism, including round robin, hash, and range partitioning. It also addresses issues like skew in partitioning and techniques to handle skew like virtual processor partitioning and histograms.