The advent of an object-oriented processor, the REKURSIV, allowed the possibility of investigating the application of object-oriented techniques to all the levels of a software system's architecture. This work is concerned with the implementation of a database system on the REKURSIV. A database system was implemented with an architecture structured as • An external level provided by DEAL, a database query language with functions. • A conceptual level consisting of an implementation of the relational algebra. • an internal level provided by the REKURSIV system. The mapping of the external to the conceptual levels is achieved through a recursive descent interpreter which was machine generated from a syntax specification. The software providing the conceptual level was systematically derived from a formal algebraic specification of the relational algebra. The internal level was experimentally investigated to quantify the nature of the contribution made to computational power by the REKURSIV's architectural innovations. The contributions made by this work are: • the methodology exposed for program derivation (in class based languages) from algebraic specifications; • the treatment of the notion of domain within formal specification; • the development of a top-down parser generator; • the establishment of a quantitative perfomance profile for the REKURSIV.