Abstract: A mechanism and method for encrypting database information such that the data can be directly processed while still in an encrypted form. The mechanism and method make use of a distributed computing network. Internal level database information is located remotely from users in the form of property-oriented positional q-code suitable for directly performing database operations on. End-user workstations have external level or conceptual level information. End-user workstations make use of codebooks to decrypt the internal level database information which is located separately from the codebooks. External-level (user-level) and/or conceptual-level (community-level) schema information is located on end-user workstations (or accessible from them), while internal-level data in the form of compressed binary sparse matrices is located separately. The internal-level data is in effect encrypted as a positional q-code.