This volume represents a valuable collective contribution to the research and development of database systems. It contains papers in a variety of topics such as data models, distributed databases, multimedia databases, concurrency control, hypermedia and document processing, user interface, query processing and database applications.Contents: Introduction to SQL/X (W Kim)An Object-Oriented Approach to Security Policies and their Access Controls for Database Management (D K Hsiao)The ESSE Project: An Overview (R Zicari et al.)The Remote-Exchange Approach to Semantic Heterogeneity in Federated Database Systems (D McLeod)A Linear Model of Distributed Query Execution Strategies (M E Orlowska & Y-C Zhang)Multimedia Data Handling in a Knowledge Representation System (E Bertino et al.)Implementation and Evaluation of a New Approach to Storage Management for Persistent Data — Towards Virtual-Memory Databases (G-Y Bai & A Makinouchi)Hyperbase System: A Structured Architecture (R Sacks-Davis et al.)A Hypermedia Document System Based on Relational Database (S Futamura et al.)Cooperative Query Answering in CoBase (Q-M Chen & W Chu)The ADKMS Knowledge Acquisition System (E Bertino et al.)Constraints for Query Optimization in Deductive Databases (J Harland & K Ramamohanarao)The Object-Oriented Database Management — A Tutorial on its Fundamentals (D K Hsiao)and other papersReadership: Computer scientists.Key Features:Comprises information about vine-copula methodDescribes new research — a flexible dependence modelingCombines experiences of prominent authors in the field