A guided tour of relational database and beyond (Q4246397)

The book is a very important contribution to the database literature. Individual chapters are devoted to the entity-relationship model, the relational data model, relational database design, incomplete information in the relational data model, computable database queries, temporal relational databases, concurrency control, deductive databases, new extensions of the relational data model and recent directions in the theory and implementation of databases. The approach is more analogous to \textit{S. Abiteboul}, \textit{R. Hull} and \textit{V. Vianu} [Foundations of databases (1995; Zbl 0848.68031)] and \textit{H. Mannila} and \textit{K.-J. Räihä} [The design of relational databases (1992; Zbl 0777.68014)] then to \textit{H. Korth}, \textit{A. Silberschatz} and \textit{S. Sudarshan} [Database system concepts (1997; Zbl 0910.68066)] or \textit{R. Ramakrishnan} [Database management systems (1997; Zbl 0903.68062)]. The choice of material is influenced by personal interests and previous results of the authors and many others. It is apparent especially in the rather long chapter devoted to the representation of incomplete information and in various database features modification that we don't find in most of other database text books. The study of computable queries and their classes is also rather important. In accordance with the authors' interests some sections are brief, e.g. the explanation of the ER model and of transactions, on the other hand we can find in the book a number of points studied so far mostly ``only'' in the papers (update languages, horizontal decomposition, BP-completeness, acyclic schemata, more types of dependencies and normal forms, relational algebra extensions etc.). An impressive list of references containing more than 700 items seems to cover every relevant book and/or paper and is equipped by useful backward references into the text of the book. All chapters are supplemented by carefully selected exercises that are not restricted to simple questions. The introduction contains very good survey of background material from the set theory, mathematical logic, theory of computing and finite-model theory. This textbook should find its way into each database teacher's and/or researcher's library.