Preface

Detailed Content Overview

Use as a textbook

The book can be covered in a total of approximately 50 - 70 lecture hours (plus 30 - 40 hours dedicated to exercises and practical experiences).

Our experience is that Parts I and II can be covered as a complete course in about 30 taught hours. Such a course requires a significant amount of additional practical activity, normally consisting of several exercises from each chapter and a project involving the design, population and use of a small database. The appendixes provide useful support for the practical activities.

Parts III and IV can be covered in a second course, or else they can be integrated in part within an extended first course; in advanced, project-centred courses, the study of current technology can be accompanied by a project dedicated to the development of technological components. Part IV, on current trends, provides material for significant project work, for example, related to object technology, or to data analysis, or to Web technology. The advanced course can be associated with further readings or with a research-oriented seminar series.

An international textbook

Making the book reflect the international nature of the subject has been a challenge and an opportunity. This book has Italian authors, who have also given regular courses in the United States, Canada and Switzerland, was edited in the United Kingdom and is directed to the worldwide market. We have purposely used a neutral version of the English language, thus avoiding country-specific jargon whenever possible. In the examples, our attitude has been to choose attribute names and values that would be immediately understandable to everybody. In a few cases, however, we have purposely followed the rules of different international contexts, without selecting one in particular. The use of car registration numbers from France, or of tax codes from Italy, will make the reader aware of the fact that data can have different syntax and semantics in different contexts and so some comprehension and adaptation effort may be needed when dealing with data in a truly worldwide approach. It should! also be noted that when dealing with money values, we have omitted the reference to a specific currency: for example, we say that a salary is ` 40 thousand', without saying whether it is dollars (and which dollars: US, Canadian, Australian, Hong Kong, ...), or Euros, or Pounds Sterling.

The Authors

Paolo Atzeni and Riccardo Torlone are professors at Università di Roma Tre. Stefano Ceri and Stefano Paraboschi are professors at Politecnico di Milano. They all teach courses on information systems and database technology and are active members of the research community. Paolo Atzeni and Stefano Ceri have many years of experience in teaching database courses, both in European and in North American universities. They have also presented many courses for professional database programmers and designers. All the authors are active researchers, operating on a wide range of areas, including distributed databases, deductive databases, active databases, databases and the Web, data warehouses, database design and so on. They are actively participating in the organization of the main International Conferences and professional Societies dealing with database technology; in particular, Paolo Atzeni is the chairman of the EDBT Foundation and Stefano Ceri is a member of the EDBT Foundation, VLDB Endowment and ACM Sigmod Advisory Committee. Their appointments include being co-chairs of VLDB 2001 in Rome.

Acknowledgements

The organization and the contents of this book have benefited from our experiences in teaching the subject in various contexts. All the students attending those courses, dispersed over many schools and countries (University of Toronto, Stanford University, Università dell'Aquila, Università di Roma `La Sapienza', Università di Roma Tre, Politecnico di Milano, Università di Modena, Università della Svizzera Italiana) deserve our deepest thanks. Many of these students have field-tested rough drafts and incomplete notes, and have contributed to their development, improvement and correction. Similarly, we would like to thank people from companies and government agencies who attended our courses for professionals and helped us in learning the practical aspects that we have tried to convey in our textbook.

We would like to thank all the colleagues who have contributed, directly or indirectly, to the development of this book, through discussions on course organization or the actual revision of drafts and notes. They include Carlo Batini, Maristella Agosti, Giorgio Ausiello, Elena Baralis, Giovanni Barone, Giampio Bracchi, Luca Cabibbo, Ed Chan, Giuseppe Di Battista, Angelo Foglietta, Piero Fraternali, Maurizio Lenzerini, Gianni Mecca, Alberto Mendelzon, Paolo Merialdo, Barbara Pernici, Silvio Salza, Fabio Schreiber, Giuseppe Sindoni, Elena Tabet, Letizia Tanca, Ernest Teniente, Carson Woo and probably some others whom we might have omitted. We thank the reviewers of the English edition for a number of very useful suggestions concerning the organization of the book and the specific content of chapters.

We thank the very many people who have contributed to the birth of this book inside McGraw-Hill. We are grateful to Gigi Mariani and Alberto Kratter Thaler who have worked with us to the Italian edition of this work. We are deeply indebted to David Hatter, who endorsed our project enthusiastically and was able to put together an effective team, together with Ellen Johnson and Mike Cotterell. These three people have dedicated an enormous amount of effort to the production process. In particular, we thank Ellen for her support in the translation, David for his careful copy-editing and for the many terminological suggestions and Mike for his professional and patient processing of our manuscript through its numerous revisions.

We would also like to thank our families, for the continuous support they have given to us and for their patience during the evenings, nights and holidays spent on this book. Specifically, Paolo Atzeni would like to thank Gianna, his wife and his children Francesco and Laura; Stefano Ceri wishes to thank Maria Teresa, his wife and his children Paolo and Gabriele; Stefano Paraboschi wishes to thank Paola, his wife; Riccardo Torlone wishes to thank Rosa, his wife.