New version not sufficiently updated[Book Review]

researchers for over 25 years, and now, with the appearance of various intranets and the Internet, multidatabases are even more important. Management of Heterogeneous and Autonomous Database Systems is a much-needed comprehensive compilation of topics in the area of heterogeneous multidatabases. It is an edited volume comprising the works of 17 leading researchers—works previously available only in a variety of conference and journal publications. Chapter 1 summarizes the major issues and topics in the area and includes two tables that categorize the major features and characteristics of 12 multidatabase systems. Chapter 2 introduces the active topic of autonomy. The next major section comprises five chapters discussing areas of semantics, schema integration, and architectural or representational issues. Especially valuable are Chapters 5 and 6. In Chapter 5, Suda Ram and V. Ramesh give a comprehensive overview of schema integration. These issues, especially schema integration and semantics, arise even more commonly in Internet querying and often in processing complex information such as semistructured, spatial, and multimedia data. It is very important to have a firm foundation in the fundamentals of these issues to deal with these more complex data types. In Chapter 6, Bogdan Czjedo and Le Gruenwald describe schema and language translations and provide a good example of the overall process of such schema and language translations. The last section comprises four chapters covering system-level issues, especially considerations of data consistency and transactions. These chapters discuss issues such as replication, concurrency control, models, and recovery. The last chapter covers issues that overlap both transactional topics and schema descriptions. The book provides an excellent annotation on the bibliography throughout the volume. It should be of great value to researchers in the field. However, although there are good introductory chapters, readers without some depth in the database area might not fully appreciate the issues discussed.