Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Database Theory, ICDT 2001, held in London, UK, in January 2001. The 26 revised full papers presented together with two invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 75 submissions. All current issues on database theory and the foundations of database systems are addressed. Among the topics covered are database queries, SQL, information retrieval, database logic, database mining, constraint databases, transactions, algorithmic aspects, semi-structured data, data engineering, XML, term rewriting, clustering, etc.