The concepts of 'data warehousing' and 'on-line analytical processing' have seen a growing interest in the research and commercial product community. Today, the trend moves away from complex centralized data warehouses to distributed data marts integrated in a common conceptual schema. However, as the first part of this paper demonstrates, there are many problems and little solutions for large distributed decision support systems in worldwide operating corporations. After showing the benefits and problems of the distributed approach, this paper outlines possibilities for achieving performance in distributed online analytical processing. Finally, the architectural framework of the prototypical distributed OLAP system CUBESTAR is outlined.