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Reviewer: Pentti A. Honkanen

Date has done it again. Just as the third edition needed to be supplemented in order to bring it up to date (no pun intended), Date has produced a fourth edition of this book. [Editor's Note— has run reviews of the last two editions. See 19, 4 (April 1978), Rev. 32,819 (2nd ed.); and 22, 9 (Sept. 1981), Rev. 38,392 (3rd ed.).] This edition differs significantly from its predecessors. First, some of the material has been rearranged. For example, in the 3rd edition the early chapters presented some rather complex notions of relational theory that caused confusion at that early point. Also, the section illustrating the relational algebra contained several query examples that bordered on being exotic. Both of these problems have been remedied in the current edition. The material covering the physical database aspects have been strengthened considerably. The major improvements, however, lie in the area where the previous editions displayed the greatest weakness, namely bringing in “real world” database management systems as opposed to System R and the CODASYL model. The use of DB2, IDMS, DATACOM/DB, and INGRES greatly enhance the practicality of the text. Finally, the inclusion of some of the design aspects and practical implementation considerations such as recovery, concurrency, security, distributed systems, and optimization round out the text in excellent fashion.