Editor's Notes

Following these notes and the Chair's message, Marianne Winslett
provides an update on the SIGMOD On-line Services which include much more than
the online version of the RECORD. Please note the call for help with
managing the on-line services; if you are interested, please contact Marianne.
On a related matter, please note that other than justified exceptions no paper
will be published in the RECORD unless it is available electronically. This will
assure that the on-line version of the RECORD archive is complete.
 
This issue contains several short articles, surveys, a bibliography,
and the regular sections on Database Research Centers and Database
Research Funding. As usual we conclude the issue with Announcements
and Calls-for-Papers.
The first paper, "Relational Database Integration in the IBM AS/400"
by S. Scholerman, L. Miller, J. Tenner, S. Tomanek and M. Zolliker,
describes the database component of AS/400 that is a general purpose
machine with database functionality built directly into the machine
architecture. In the paper "MoodView: An Advanced Graphical User
Interface for OODBMSs", I. B. Arpinar, A. Dogac and C. Evrendilek
argue that OODBMSs require more than declarative query languages
and programming languages as their interfaces since they are designed and 
implemented for complex applications. They describe a complete programming
environment, MoodView, that has been developed for this purpose.
The next paper, "Experiences with HyperBase: A Hypertext Database
Supporting Collaborative Work" by U.K. Wiil, describes the architecture
and experiences using a hypertext database.  This database supports
collaborative  work and is based on a client-server architecture.

In the paper "Implementation of a Graph-Based Data Model for Complex
Objects", M. Levene, A. Poulovassilis, K. Benkerimi, S. Schwartz and
E. Tuv present a graph based data model whose single data structure
is a directed graph. Development of a prototype database
system is also described.
"Parallel Query Processing in Shared Disk Database Systems" is the
subject of the paper by E. Rahm. The paper compares the shared disk
and shared nothing architectures for parallel query processing and
finds many potential benefits for the former. Details of
necessary extensions for transaction management to support
intra-transaction parallelism in the shared disk environment are also
described. Next is the paper "A Performance
Study of Concurrency Control in a Real-Time Main Memory Database 
System" by L. Gruenwald and S. Liu. The paper conducts a simulation
study to compare Two Phase Locking With Higher Priority with
a real time optimistic concurrency control algorithm.
The results show that the latter algorithm outperforms the first
for finite resources.
The last paper in the Articles section is "Role-Based Security, Object
Oriented Databases & Separation of Duty" by M. Nyanchama and S. Osborn.
The paper combines concepts of role-based protection and object oriented
databases to specify and enforce separation of duty as required for
commercial database integrity.

The first paper in the Surveys section is
"Concurrency Control in Trusted Database Management Systems: A Survey"
by B. Thuraisingham and H.P. Ko. It provides a brief overview of
Trusted DBMSs and evaluates concurrency control algorithms developed
for Trusted DBMSs. The second paper, "A Survey on the Usage of SQL"
by H. Lu, H.C. Chan and K.K. Wei, examines the use of SQL in
organizations. It presents a discussion of the profiles of users,
application areas where SQL is used, the different features of SQL
that are used and the difficulties faced by users.

"An Update of the Temporal Database Bibliography" by N. Kline is the 5th in a
series of bibliographies concerning temporal databases.  It includes papers that
have been published since the last bibliography as well as papers not included
in previous editions. The first report in the Database Research Center section
is "Database Research at the Data-Intensive Systems Center", describing the
research activities of the newly formed center which includes faculty from the
Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology and Portland State
University. The next report is "Database Research at the University of Twente".
The University of Twente is the only one in the Netherlands with an independent
computer science department.  The report gives a brief overview of their main
research efforts and recent publications. M. Winslett describes recent turmoil
over NSF, ARPA and HPCC, and covers funding opportunities in her regular column
of Database Funding.

Since this issue will reach most readers in December, I'll take this opportunity
to wish all of you cheerful holidays and a happy new year (yes, 1994 is almost here).



Arie Segev
Berkeley, California
October, 1993