Techniques are described herein for performing database operations against location and access transparent metadata units called fat pointers organized into globally distributed data structures. The fat pointers are created by extracting values corresponding to a particular key and paring each value with a reference to the local location and server that has the native format record containing the value. The fat pointers may be transferred to any server in the cluster, even if the server is different from the server that has the native format record. In general, most operations are performed against fat pointers rather than the native format records. This allows the cluster to perform work against arbitrary types of data efficiently and in a constant amount of time despite the variable sizes and structures of records.