The database field has experienced a rapid and incessant growth since the development of relational databases. The progress in database systems and applications has produced a diverse landscape of specialized technology areas that have often become the exclusive domain of research specialists. Examples include active databases, temporal databases, object-oriented databases, deductive databases, imprecise reasoning and queries, and multimedia information systems. This book provides a systematic introduction to and an in-depth treatment of these advanced database areas. It supplies practitioners and researchers with authoritative coverage of recent technological advances that are shaping the future of commercial database systems and intelligent information systems. Advanced Database Systems was written by a team of six leading specialists who have made significant contributions to the development of the technology areas covered in the book. Benefiting from the authors' long experience teaching graduate and professional courses, this book is designed to provide a gradual introduction to advanced research topics and includes many examples and exercises to support its use for individual study, desk reference, and graduate classroom teaching.
Carlo Zaniolo holds the Friedman Chair in Knowledge Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is an active resarcher in the areas of database, knowledge bases, and intelligent databases.
Stefano Ceri is Professor of Database Systems at Politecnico di Milano. His research interests are focused on extending database technology to incorporate data distribution, deductive and active rules, and object orientation.
Christos Faloutsos is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research interests include physical database design, searching methods for text, geographic information systems, and indexing methods for medical and multimedia databases.
Richard T. Snodgrass is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Arizona, and co-director of the TimeCenter, an international center for the support of temporal database applications on traditional and emerging DBMS technologies. His resarch interests include temporal databases, query language design, query optimization and evaluation, storage structures, database design, and software development databases.
V.S. Subrahmanian is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, where his work focuses on incomplete and uncertain information in databases and knowledge bases, integrated heterogeneous data and software, and multimedia systems. V.S. Subrahmanian was awarded his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Syracuse University in 1989. He is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland, where he also heads the Multimedia Systems Laboratory. He is the recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, and the Distinguished Young Scientist Award from the Maryland Academy of Sciences. He has worked extensively in knowledge bases, synthesizing techniques in artificial intelligence, and database engineering. He is an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and AI Communications Journal, and co-author of Advanced Database Systems (1997 Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc.).
