18. A system comprising: one or more clients, and a plurality of database servers that provide access to records of a database; wherein: each client includes: a query parser that parses a user query to identify a skeletal query form corresponding to the user query and one or more arguments associated with the user query, and identifies a target database server among the plurality of database servers based on the skeletal query form and the one or more arguments; determine whether a compiled skeletal query corresponding to the identified skeletal query form is available at the target database server, the compiled skeletal query including machine code that is executable directly by the processing system, and, if the compiled skeletal query is available at the target database server: communicate the user query and one or more arguments associated with the user query to the target database server; receiving results of executing machine code corresponding to the compiled skeletal query at the database server using the one or more arguments associated with the user query; and providing the results in response to the user query; and if the compiled skeletal query is not available at the target database server: provide the compiled skeletal query to the target database server.
18. A system comprising: one or more clients, and a plurality of database servers that provide access to records of a database; wherein: each client includes: a query parser that parses a user query to identify a skeletal query form corresponding to the user query and one or more arguments associated with the user query, and identifies a target database server among the plurality of database servers based on the skeletal query form and the one or more arguments; determine whether a compiled skeletal query corresponding to the identified skeletal query form is available at the target database server, the compiled skeletal query including machine code that is executable directly by the processing system, and, if the compiled skeletal query is available at the target database server: communicate the user query and one or more arguments associated with the user query to the target database server; receiving results of executing machine code corresponding to the compiled skeletal query at the database server using the one or more arguments associated with the user query; and providing the results in response to the user query; and if the compiled skeletal query is not available at the target database server: provide the compiled skeletal query to the target database server. 24. The system of claim 18 , including a query server, and wherein the client determines whether the compiled skeletal query is available at the target database server by querying the query server.