Book excerpt: This book consists of the refereed proceedings of the 15th British National Conference on Databases, BNCOD 15, held in London, in July 1997. The 12 revised full papers presented were selected from more than 30 submissions. Also included are 10 poster presentations and the invited lecture on The Role of Intelligent Software Agents in Advanced Information Systems by Larry Kerschberg. The papers are organized in topical sections on transaction processing, optimization, object-orientation and the Internet, and database integration.