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.

Transactions are a concept related to the logical database as seen from the perspective of database application programmers: a transaction is a sequence of database actions that is to be executed as an atomic unit of work. The processing of transactions on databases is a well- established area with many of its foundations having already been laid in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The unique feature of this textbook is that it bridges the gap between the theory of transactions on the logical database and the implementation of the related actions on the underlying physical database. The authors relate the logical database, which is composed of a dynamically changing set of data items with unique keys, and the underlying physical database with a set of fixed-size data and index pages on disk. Their treatment of transaction processing builds on the “do-redo-undo” recovery paradigm, and all methods and algorithms presented are carefully designed to be compatible with this paradigm as well as with write-ahead logging, steal-and-no-force buffering, and fine-grained concurrency control. Chapters 1 to 6 address the basics needed to fully appreciate transaction processing on a centralized database system within the context of our transaction model, covering topics like ACID properties, database integrity, buffering, rollbacks, isolation, and the interplay of logical locks and physical latches. Chapters 7 and 8 present advanced features including deadlock-free algorithms for reading, inserting and deleting tuples, while the remaining chapters cover additional advanced topics extending on the preceding foundational chapters, including multi-granular locking, bulk actions, versioning, distributed updates, and write-intensive transactions. This book is primarily intended as a text for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on database management in general or transaction processing in particular.

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.