Open distributed systems include general service functions that set special requirements for information storage. We have developed a special-purpose database engine to meet these requirements. In this paper we describe our database engine and its measured performance. The database engine is memory based, relational, and supports properties that enable it to be used as an object based system. We justify the feasibility of our approach by a numerical example involving a telephone switching system. The example shows that the measured database engine performance is of the correct magnitude for the needs of demanding distributed systems.