When I was asked to update Sams Teach Yourself SAP in 24 Hours, I was completely thrilled. Seriously! The world of SAP and our world in general have gone through major upheavals in the last few years, and I was excited to share with SAPlings and veterans alike just how much had changed. In the same way, I was anxious to realign and...

Materialized views have recently seen a renewed interest in the research and commercial communitites because of their applications in warehousing, retailing, billing, visualization, integrity constraints, query optimization, and decision support. All leading database vendors are currently implementing in their systems materialized views...

Microsoft’s principal data access technology, ADO.NET Entity Framework, has had two major releases as part of the .NET Framework. .NET 3.5 brought us the first version of Entity Framework, which is covered in the first edition of Programming Entity Framework (O’Reilly). In 2010, Microsoft .NET 4 was released, containing the...

There is a strong need for advances in the fields of image indexing and retrieval and visual query languages for multimedia databases. Image technology is facing both classical and novel problems for the organization and filtering of increasingly large amounts of pictorial data. Novel kinds of problems, such as indexing and high-level...

Databases are the workhorses of the information age. Like Atlas, they go largely unnoticed in supporting the digital world we’ve come to inhabit. It’s easy to forget that our digital interactions, from commenting and tweeting to searching and sorting, are in essence interactions with a database. Because of this fundamental...