The design and implementation of R*, an experimental prototype of a distributed system for the management of interrelated, voluntarily cooperating, but also autonomous databases is based on several major objectives: site autonomy, transparency, ease of use and performance. This paper discusses the way data definition and control statements are executed in a distributed environment and shows how the general objectives are fulfilled. Specialized distributed execution facilities have been developed to facilitate the implementation of complex multi-site functions. This paper describes the facilities and methodology used to implement the distributed processing needed to perform multi-site data definition operations in R*.