Information security is receiving a great deal of attention as computers increasingly process more and more sensitive information. A multilevel secure database management system (MLS DBMS) is designed to store, retrieve and process information in compliance with certain mandatory security requirements, essential for protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access, modification and abuse. Such systems are characterized by data objects labeled at different security levels and accessed by users cleared to those levels. Unless transaction processing modules for these systems...

Recent years have seen an explosive growth in the use of new database applications such as CAD/CAM systems, spatial information systems, and multimedia information systems. The needs of these applications are far more complex than traditional business applications. They call for support of objects with complex data types, such as images and spatial objects, and for support of objects with wildly varying numbers of index terms, such as documents. Traditional indexing techniques such as the B-tree and its variants do not efficiently support these applications, and so new indexing mechanisms...

also in: THE KLUWER INTERNATIONAL SERIES ON ASIAN STUDIES IN COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCE, Volume 2

Mining Very Large Databases with Parallel Processing addresses the problem of large-scale data mining. It is an interdisciplinary text, describing advances in the integration of three computer science areas, namely intelligent' (machine learning-based) data mining techniques, relational databases and parallel processing. The basic idea is to use concepts and techniques of the latter two areas - particularly parallel processing - to speed up and scale up data mining algorithms.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part presents a comprehensive review of intelligent...

Earth date, August 11, 1997 "Beam me up Scottie " "We cannot do it This is not Star Trek's Enterprise. This is early years Earth." True, this is not yet the era of Star Trek, we cannot beam captain James T. Kirk or captain Jean Luc Pickard or an apple or anything else anywhere. What we can do though is beam information about Kirk or Pickard or an apple or an insurance agent. We can beam a record of a patient, the status of an engine, a weather report. We can beam this information anywhere, to mobile workers, to field engineers, to a track loading apples, to ships crossing the Oceans, to web...

Information systems are the backbone of many of today's computerized applications. Distributed databases and the infrastructure needed to support them have been well studied. However, this book is the first to address distributed database interoperability by examining the successes and failures, various approaches, infrastructures, and trends of the field.
A gap exists in the way that these systems have been investigated by real practitioners. This gap is more pronounced than usual, partly because of the way businesses operate, the systems they have, and the difficulties created by...

Database Recovery presents an in-depth discussion on all aspects of database recovery. Firstly, it introduces the topic informally to set the intuitive understanding, and then presents a formal treatment of recovery mechanism. In the past, recovery has been treated merely as a mechanism which is implemented on an ad-hoc basis. This book elevates the recovery from a mechanism to a concept, and presents its essential properties. A book on recovery is incomplete if it does not present how recovery is practiced in commercial systems. This book, therefore, presents a detailed description...

One of the main uses of computer systems is the management of large amounts of symbolic information representing the state of some application domain, such as information about all the people I communicate with in my personal address database, or relevant parts of the outer space in the knowledge base of a NASA space mission. While database management systems offer only the basic services of information storage and retrieval, more powerful knowledge systems offer, in addition, a number of advanced services such as deductive and abductive reasoning for the purpose of finding explanations and...

Object-oriented database management systems (OODBMS) are used to imple- ment and maintain large object databases on persistent storage. Regardless whether the underlying database model follows the object-oriented, the rela- tional or the object-relational paradigm, a key feature of any DBMS product is content based access to data sets. On the one hand this feature provides user-friendly query interfaces based on predicates to describe the desired data. On the other hand it poses challenging questions regarding DBMS design and implementation as well as the application development process on...

Great advances have been made in the database field. Relational and object- oriented databases, distributed and client/server databases, and large-scale data warehousing are among the more notable. However, none of these advances promises to have as great and direct an effect on the daily lives of ordinary citizens as video databases. Video databases will provide a quantum jump in our ability to deal with visual data, and in allowing people to access and manipulate visual information in ways hitherto thought impossible.
Video Database Systems: Issues, Products and Applications...