You re a computing or information student with a huge mountain to climb that final-year research project. Don t worry, because with this book guardian angels are at hand, in the form of four brilliant academics who will guide you through the process. The book provides you with all the tools necessary to successfully complete a final year research project. Based on an approach that has been tried and tested on over 500 projects, it offers a simple step-by-step guide to the key processes involved. Not only that, but the book also contains lots of useful information for supervisors and examiners including guidelines on how to review a final year project.

Database systems of the next generation are likely to be inherently very complex due to the diversity of requirements placed on them. Incorporating active, real time, and temporal virtues in one database system is an arduous effort but is also a commend able one. This book presents the proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Active, Real Time, and Temporal Database Systems (ARTDB 97), held in Como, Milan, in September 1997. The aim of the workshop was to bring researchers together from the active and real time research communities, and to examine the current state of the art in active, real time, and temporal database systems. This book offers a collection of papers presented at the ARTDB 97 workshop. The papers, many of them representing proficient and tenable results, illuminate the feasibility of building database system supporting reactive behavior, while enforcing timeliness and predictability. The book contains nine papers carefully reviewed and accepted by the program committee, three invited papers written by prominent researchers in the field, and two summaries of the panel discussions held at the workshop. The program committee received seventeen submissions, where each submission was reviewed by at least three program committee members. The two panel sessions focused on predictability issues and on practical experience of active, real time, and temporal database systems. The ARTDB 97 workshop was held in cooperation with the IEEE Technical Committees on Real Time Systems and Complexity in Computing, and the ACM Special Interest Group on Manipulation of Data.

The areas of active and real-time databases have seen a tremendous growth of interest in the past few years, particularly with regard to their support of time-critical and embedded applications. ARTDB-95 provided, therefore, an important forum for researchers from both communities to discuss research results, and also to chart new directions for the future. As well as the 11 submitted papers presented at the workshop, this volume also contains 4 invited papers on the following topics: the impact of active databases on commercial practice; the optimization of active database transactions; the need for better language, compiler and tool support for real-time databases; and the origin of time constraints associated with data, events and actions. Together the papers give a comprehensive overview of current research, and will provide invaluable reading for academic and industrial researchers and students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.