The QueryGrid™ feature in Aster provides a way to read data from or write data to a remote database host. Initially, the remote host may be a Teradata or Hadoop host. Previously, the ability to access a remote database was provided by the SQL-Map Reduce functions load_from_teradata, load_to_teradata, load_from_hcatalog and load_to_hcatalog. While this is still true, the ability to define a foreign server object has been provided so that foreign databases, tables and columns can be referenced directly in SQL statements, as described in QueryGrid Features (Aster Database).