Automation is nothing new to industry. It has a long tradition on the factory floor, where its constant objective has been to increase the productivity of manufacturing processes. Only with the advent of computers could the focus of automation widen to include administrative and information-handling tasks. More recently, automation has been extended to the more intellectual tasks of production planning and control, material and resource planning, engineering design, and quality control. New challenges arise in the form of flexible manu facturing, assembly automation, and automated floor vehicles, to name just a few. The sheer complexity of the problems as well as the state of the art has led scientists and engineers to concentrate on issues that could easily be isolated. For example, it was much simpler to build CAD systems whose sole objective was to ease the task of drawing, rather than to worry at the same time about how the design results could be interfaced with the manufacturing or assembly processes. It was less problematic to gather statistics from quality control and to print reports than to react immediately to first hints of irregularities by inter facing with the designers or manufacturing control, or, even better, by auto matically diagnosing the causes from the design and planning data. A heav- though perhaps unavoidable - price must today be paid whenever one tries to assemble these isolated solutions into a larger, integrated system."

Automation is nothing new to industry. It has a long tradition on the factory floor, where its constant objective has been to increase the productivity of manufacturing processes. Only with the advent of computers could the focus of automation widen to include administrative and information-handling tasks. More recently, automation has been extended to the more intellectual tasks of production planning and control, material and resource planning, engineering design, and quality control. New challenges arise in the form of flexible manu facturing, assembly automation, and automated floor vehicles, to name just a few. The sheer complexity of the problems as well as the state of the art has led scientists and engineers to concentrate on issues that could easily be isolated. For example, it was much simpler to build CAD systems whose sole objective was to ease the task of drawing, rather than to worry at the same time about how the design results could be interfaced with the manufacturing or assembly processes. It was less problematic to gather statistics from quality control and to print reports than to react immediately to first hints of irregularities by inter facing with the designers or manufacturing control, or, even better, by auto matically diagnosing the causes from the design and planning data. A heav- though perhaps unavoidable - price must today be paid whenever one tries to assemble these isolated solutions into a larger, integrated system.

EDBT 2000 is the seventh conference in a series dedicated to the advancement of database technology. This year's conference special theme, \Connect Millions of Users and Data Sources," underscores the importance of databases for the information age that is dawning with the new millennium. The importance - rives not just from the observation that the information age essentially rests on theconvergenceofcommunications, computing, andstorage.Equallyimportant, many of the concepts and techniques underlying the success of databasesystems have independent meaning and impact for today's distributed information s- tems. The papers in the volume should also be seen in this light. The EDBT 2000 conference program includes 30 research papers selected by the program committee out of 187 submissions, covering advances in research, development, and applications of databases. The conference program also - cludes six industry andapplications papers, a panel discussion, six tutorials, and several software demonstrations. The conference features three distinguished - vited speakers: Ashish Gupta discusses database issues in electronic commerce, Stefano Ceri addresses the impact and challenges of XML on databases, and Andreas Reuter shares his views on new perspectives on database technology. The technical contributions presented at the EDBT 2000 conference are colle- ed and preserved in this volume that we are pleased to present to you with the expectation that it will serve as a valuable research and reference tool in your professional life.

Datenbanken spielen als Informationsspeicher immer mehr eine zentrale Rolle. Daher mussen ihr erfolgreicher Aufbau und ihr fehlerfreier Betrieb langfristig gesichert sein. Umfassende Kenntnisse der verwendeten Modelle, der verschiedenen Entwurfstechniken sowie der beim laufenden Betrieb zu beachtenden Massregeln sind dazu notwendig. Das Buch widmet sich diesen Themen vor allem unter dem Aspekt der Datenbanknutzung. So kann der Praktiker die behandelten Konzepte und Techniken sofort anwenden. Ebenso bietet es Studierenden und Wissenschaftlern fundierte Information uber aktuelle Techniken und Trends (verteilte datenintensive Anwendungen, Migration auf moderne Plattformen, Standardisierung). Drei durchgangige Anwendungsbeispiele gestatten die Vergleichbarkeit unterschiedlicher Loesungsmethoden und machen das Buch besonders wertvoll. Fur Wissenschaftler und Studierende sowie Datenbank-Anwender und -Entwickler in Wirtschaft und Industrie.

Datenbanken spielen als Informationsspeicher immer mehr eine zentrale Rolle. Daher mussen ihr erfolgreicher Aufbau und ihr fehlerfreier Betrieb langfristig gesichert sein. Umfassende Kenntnisse der verwendeten Modelle, der verschiedenen Entwurfstechniken sowie der beim laufenden Betrieb zu beachtenden Massregeln sind dazu notwendig. Das Buch widmet sich diesen Themen vor allem unter dem Aspekt der Datenbanknutzung. So kann der Praktiker die behandelten Konzepte und Techniken sofort anwenden. Ebenso bietet es Studierenden und Wissenschaftlern fundierte Information uber aktuelle Techniken und Trends (verteilte datenintensive Anwendungen, Migration auf moderne Plattformen, Standardisierung).
Drei durchgangige Anwendungsbeispiele ermoglichen den Vergleich unterschiedlicher Losungsmethoden."