Today there are many opinions supporting database distributed systems and centralized database systems and considering them as a guaranteed solution, even if some cases prove this is not the most efficient approach. We will try to fight against to this preconceived idea trough reveal of some technologies as federated database systems, which are applicable in some categories of circumstances. Both, the latter ones and distributed database systems could represent a solid platform for interfacing technologies such as: data warehouses, data marts, OLAP and OLTP systems, data mining, web, etc. This paper aims making familiar to few alternatives for the classic distributed systems, analyzing those technologies having distributed systems upstream placed, and also the causality inter-relationships that exist between them.