Book excerpt: Database management is attracting wide interest in both academic and industrial contexts. New application areas such as CAD/CAM, geographic information systems, and multimedia are emerging. The needs of these application areas are far more complex than those of conventional business applications. The purpose of this book is to bring together a set of current research issues that addresses a broad spectrum of topics related to database systems and applications. The book is divided into four parts: - object-oriented databases, - temporal/historical database systems, - query processing in database systems, - heterogeneity, interoperability, open system architectures, multimedia database systems.