[OT] large db question about no joins

[Paul Rubin]

Daniel Fetchinson <fetchinson at googlemail.com> writes:
> Yes, sorry for using the wrong words, my question then is how do I
> solve a problem similar to my zoo/cage/animal/leg problem with
> distributed databases?

In the case of BigTable, you could write a suitable MapReduce task.
You might look at the Wikipedia articles about MapReduce or Hadoop, or
the Hadoop docs, to see how this sort of thing is done.