Abstract. The need and opportunity to e ciently nd patterns and features in the vast and growing scienti c data sets of today is apparent. In this paper, we present an extensible and distributed query processing system | Conquest (CONcurrent QUEries over Space and Time) which delivers high performance for non-traditional database query applications. Conquest is composed of components: query management subsystem, query execution engine and user-interface subsystem. Both operation and data parallelism are supported. Scientists can arbitrarily introduce their familiar well-known raster and vector geometry data types as well as particular algorithms for speci c applications. Tools are available to help support new data types and operators so that developers can focus on programming their core logic of algorithms without paying a penalty to deal with the novel execution environment's features. 1