Parallelism is a viable solution to constructing high performance object-oriented database systems. In parallel systems based on a shared-nothing architecture, the database is horizontally declustered across multiple processors, enabling the system to employ multiple processors to speedup the execution time of a query. The placement of objects across the processors has a significant impact on the performance of queries that traverse a few objects. The paper describes and evaluates a greedy algorithm for the placement of objects across the processors of a system. Moreover, it describes two alternative availability strategies and quantifies their performance tradeoff using a trace-driven simulation study.>