Designing and programming dependable distributed applications is very difficult. Databases provide features like transactions and replication that can help in the implementation of dependable applications. There are in particular various free databases that make it economically feasible to run a database on each computer in a system. Hence, one can partition database tables across multiple hosts to harness the processing power and disks of multiple machines. We describe a system, DOSE, that simplifies partitioning tables across multiple hosts. DOSE exposes the partitions to the programmer rather than giving the illusion of a single table. Our focus is on providing a simple implementation that works for freely-available databases, on automatic tuning of the partitions for best performance, and on applying the fault tolerance mechanisms of the databases to build dependable distributed systems. We show how we use this system to implement a distributed work queue.