This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed and revised post-workshop proceedings of two international meetings devoted to deductive databases and logic programming. The technical papers presenting original research results were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the present book, together with several survey articles summarizing the state of the art in the area. Thus, the book is the ultimate reference for anybody interested in the theory and application of deductive databases and logic programming.

These post-proceedings contain the revised versions of the accepted papers of the international workshop \Transactions and Database Dynamics", which was the eighth workshop in a series focusing on foundations of models and languages for data and objects (FoMLaDO). Seven long papers and three short papers were accepted for inclusion in the proceedings. The papers address various issues of transactions and database dynamics: { criteria and protocols for global snapshot isolation in federated transaction management, { uni ed theory of concurrency control and replication control, { speci cation of evolving information systems, { inheritance mechanisms for deductive object databases with updates, { speci cation of active rules for maintaining database consistency, { integrity checking in subtransactions, { open nested transactions for multi-tier architectures, { declarative speci cation of transactions with static and dynamic integrity constraints, { logic-based speci cation of update queries as open nested transactions, and { execution guarantees and transactional processes in electronic commerce payments. In addition to the regular papers, there are papers resulting from two working groups. The rst working group paper discusses the basis for transactional c- putation. In particular, it addresses the speci cation of transactional software. The second working group paper focuses on transactions in electronic commerce applications. Among others, Internet transactions, payment protocols, and c- currency control and persistence mechanisms are discussed. Moreover, there is an invited paper by Jari Veijalainen which discusses tr- sactional aspects in mobile electronic commerce.

Database transformations consist of queries and updates which are two fundamental types of computations in any databases - the first provides the capability to retrieve data and the second is used to maintain databases in light of ever-changing application domains. This dissertation aims to lay down the foundations for establishing a theoretical framework of database transformations in the context of complex-value databases. The previous findings reveal that it is very difficult to characterise common features of database queries and updates in a way which is meaningful for further investigations. Nevertheless, the advent of the sequential Abstract State Machine (ASM) thesis capturing sequential algorithms sheds light on the study of database transformations. Observing that the class of computations described by database transformations may be formalised as algorithms respecting database principles, we propose the database ASM thesis for a complete characterisation of database transformations. It turns out that every database transformation characterised by five postulates can be behaviourally simulated by a database Abstract State Machine (DB-ASM) with the same signature and background, and vice versa. Furthermore, a logic for DB-ASMs is defined. In spite of bounded non-determinism permitted by DB-ASMs, the logic is proven to be sound and complete.

This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the International Workshop on Logic in Databases, LID'96, held in San Miniato, Italy, in July 1996, as the final meeting of an EC-US cooperative activity. The volume presents 21 revised full papers selected from 49 submissions as well as 3 invited contributions and a summary of a panel discussion on deductive databases: challenges, opportunities and future directions. The retrospective survey on logic and databases by Jack Minker deserves a special mention: it is a 56-page overview and lists 357 references. The papers are organized in sections on uncertainty, temporal and spatial reasoning, updates, active databases, semantics, advanced applications, query evaluation, language extensions, and logic constructs and expressive power.

These are the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR 2005) ... the eighth conference was held in Diamante, Italy, from 5th to 8th of September 2005.

It is a pleasure and an honor to be able to present this collection of papers to Ray Reiter on the occasion of his 60th birthday. To say that Ray's research has had a deep impact on the field of Artificial Intel ligence is a considerable understatement. Better to say that anyone thinking of do ing work in areas like deductive databases, default reasoning, diagnosis, reasoning about action, and others should realize that they are likely to end up proving corol laries to Ray's theorems. Sometimes studying related work makes us think harder about the way we approach a problem; studying Ray's work is as likely to make us want to drop our way of doing things and take up his. This is because more than a mere visionary, Ray has always been a true leader. He shows us how to proceed not by pointing from his armchair, but by blazing a trail himself, setting up camp, and waiting for the rest of us to arrive. The International Joint Conference on Ar tificial Intelligence clearly recognized this and awarded Ray its highest honor, the Research Excellence award in 1993, before it had even finished acknowledging all the founders of the field. The papers collected here sample from many of the areas where Ray has done pi oneering work. One of his earliest areas of application was databases, and this is re flected in the chapters by Bertossi et at. and the survey chapter by Minker.

This book constitutes the joint refereed proceedings of the three confederated conferences, CoopIS 2003, DOA 2003, and ODBASE 2003, held in Catania, Sicily, Italy, in November 2003. The 95 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 360 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on information integration and mediation, Web services, agent systems, cooperation and evolution, peer-to-peer systems, cooperative systems, trust management, workflow systems, information dissemination systems, data management, the Semantic Web, data mining and classification, ontology management, temporal and spatial data, data semantics and metadata, real-time systems, ubiquitous systems, adaptability and mobility, systems engineering, software engineering, and transactions.

Logic and object-orientation have come to be recognized as being among the most powerful paradigms for modeling information systems. The term "information systems" is used here in a very general context to denote database systems, software development systems, knowledge base systems, proof support systems, distributed systems and reactive systems. One of the most vigorously researched topics common to all information systems is "formal modeling". An elegant high-level abstraction applicable to both application domain and system domain concepts will always lead to a system design from "outside in"; that is, the aggregation of ideas is around real-life objects about which the system is to be designed. Formal methods \yhen applied with this view in mind, especially during early stages of system development, can lead to a formal reasoning on the intended properties, thus revealing system flaws that might otherwise be discovered much later. Logic in different styles and semantics is being used to model databases and their transactions; it is also used to specify concurrent, distributed, real-time, and reactive systems. ,The notion of "object" is central to the modeling of object oriented databases, as well as object-oriented design and programs in software engineering. Both database and software engineering communities have undoubtedly made important contributions to formalisms based on logic and objects. It is worthwhile bringing together the ideas developed by the two communities in isolation, and focusing on integrating their common strengths.

"This reference expands the field of database technologies through four-volumes of in-depth, advanced research articles from nearly 300 of the world's leading professionals"--Provided by publisher.

Traditional theory and practice of write-ahead logging and of database recovery focus on three failure classes: transaction failures (typically due to deadlocks) resolved by transaction rollback; system failures (typically power or software faults) resolved by restart with log analysis, "redo," and "undo" phases; and media failures (typically hardware faults) resolved by restore operations that combine multiple types of backups and log replay. The recent addition of single-page failures and single-page recovery has opened new opportunities far beyond the original aim of immediate, lossless repair of single-page wear-out in novel or traditional storage hardware. In the contexts of system and media failures, efficient single-page recovery enables on-demand incremental "redo" and "undo" as part of system restart or media restore operations. This can give the illusion of practically instantaneous restart and restore: instant restart permits processing new queries and updates seconds after system reboot and instant restore permits resuming queries and updates on empty replacement media as if those were already fully recovered. In the context of node and network failures, instant restart and instant restore combine to enable practically instant failover from a failing database node to one holding merely an out-of-date backup and a log archive, yet without loss of data, updates, or transactional integrity. In addition to these instant recovery techniques, the discussion introduces self-repairing indexes and much faster offline restore operations, which impose no slowdown in backup operations and hardly any slowdown in log archiving operations. The new restore techniques also render differential and incremental backups obsolete, complete backup commands on a database server practically instantly, and even permit taking full up-to-date backups without imposing any load on the database server. Compared to the first version of this book, this second edition adds sections on applications of single-page repair, instant restart, single-pass restore, and instant restore. Moreover, it adds sections on instant failover among nodes in a cluster, applications of instant failover, recovery for file systems and data files, and the performance of instant restart and instant restore.