A system and method for configuring a plurality of processing nodes into a parallel-processing database system are described herein. Each of a plurality of processing nodes connected by a network receive software and one or more configuration files related to the intended function of the processing node. The software may include homogeneous agent software, one or more library dynamic-link libraries (DLL), and the like. The configuration file is used to configure the homogeneous agent to operate as the intended node in a global-results processing matrix, a general-purpose query processing matrix, or a index-base query processing matrix. Another node or nodes may be configured to convert query-based programming code to intermediary source code in a common programming language and then compile the intermediary source code into a dynamic link library (DLL) or other type of executable. The DLL is then distributed among the processing nodes of the processing matrix, whereupon various subsets of the processing nodes execute related portions of the DLL substantially in parallel to generate query results.