Editor's (Farewell) Notes  

This is my last issue as an Editor-in-Chief after serving in this capacity
for more than six years. When I took the job at the end of 1988 I set
five targets for the RECORD: 1) publishing it on a regular basis such
that it reaches the readers around the middle of the month of publication;
2) Improving the quality of accepted articles; 3) putting together special
issues on emerging research areas; 4) Encouraging contributions other
than articles, such as annotated bibliographies and workshop reports; and
5) Establishing regular sections such as the Database Research Centers Reports.
 
I am satisfied that I have achieved all those five goals. This, however,
would not have been possible without the dedicated service of the Associate
Editors. I would like to take this opportunity and thank the current editors
(Rafael Alonso,  Jose Blakeley, Leonard Gallagher, Amit Sheth, and Xiaolei Qian)
and the past ones (Hank Korth, Marguerite Murphy, Timos Sellis,
Fred Sprinsteel, and
Marianne Winslett).  Won Kim. SIGMOD Chair, has played an important role
in expanding the regular sections of the RECORD, by introducing the trade-press,
database research surveys, and database standards activities sections; I thank him
for his leadership. Thanks are also due to several students  (and ex-students) 
who helped in the time consuming task of producing the issues; they include
Rakesh Chandra,  Abhirup Chatterjee, Ajit Patankar, and Leon Zhao.
Finally, I welcome the new Editor-in-Chief,
Jennifer Widom (Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford,
CA 94305-2140; widom@cs.stanford.edu).

In addition to the regular sections, this issue contains several articles, a manifesto,
annotated bibliographies, and a conference report. In the articles section, J. Zhang
describes an electronic dictionary system developed using object-oriented databases.
Dogac et al. describe the design and implementation of an OO DBMS.
Karlapalem et al. present a flexible architecture to dynamically connect
localized heterogeneous databases. This architecture can be used in migrating legacy information systems to modern computing environments.
Hanna critically examines IFO -- a semantic data model, and shows that it is actually a subset of the semantic data model proposed by Hammer.
Ng and Hung study the impact of multigranularity locking on the performance of 
multiple job class transaction processing systems, and 
Jannink describes algorithms for key deletions in B+-trees and shows their 
relation to search and insertion algorithms.

Darwen and Date present a manifesto for the future direction of database 
management systems. The manifesto recognizes the importance and significance of the relational model, but strongly rejects SQL from future database systems.
Readers are invited to send commentaries on this manifesto.

This issue includes two annotated bibliographies -- first, on benchmarks for 
object databases by Chaudhri, and second, on active databases by Jaeger et al. Berra et al. report on the ACM Multimedia '94 Conference Workshop on Multimedia 
Database Management Systems.

In the Database Research Centers section, Jarke describes information systems 
research at RWTH in Aachen, Germany; and  Schlageter et al. describe database
research at University of Hagen, Hagen, Germany. In the trade press section, Rafael Alonso has selected an article by Medsker et 
al. that compares user interfaces for relational databases on microcomputers.
I would like to thank  the magazine Data Base Management
for allowing the reprint of the article in SIGMOD RECORD.
.PP
In the section on Database Funding Xiaolei Qian discusses the potential impact 
of the 1994 election on research funding and
describes the recent requests 
for proposals from ARPA, NSF, NASA, DoD and US Army. 
As usual the issue concludes with  Announcements and Call for Papers.


Arie Segev
February, 1995