Book excerpt: This remarkably comprehensive new book assembles concepts and results in relational databases theory previously scattered through journals, books, conference proceedings, and technical memoranda in one convenient source, and introduces pertinent new material not found elsewhere. The book is intended for a second course in databases, but is an excellent reference for researchers in the field. The material covered includes relational algebra, functional dependencies, multivalued and join dependencies, normal forms, tableaux and the chase computation, representation theory, domain and tuple relational calculus, query modification, database semantics and null values, acyclic database schemes, template dependencies, and computed relations. The final chapter is a brief survey of query languages in existing relational systems. Each chapter contains numerous examples and exercises, along with bibliographic remarks. - Back cover.