The theme of this book is the potential of new advanced database systems. The volume presents the proceedings of the 10th British National Conference on Databases, held in Aberdeen, Scotland, in July 1992. The volume contains two invited papers, one on the promise of distributed computing and the challenges of legacy systems by M.L. Brodie, and the other on object-oriented requirements capture and analysis and the Orca project by D.J.L. Gradwell. The following four parts each contain three submitted papers selected from a total of 36 submissions.