The 26 papers that compose this book were created for a meeting held in September of 1987 in Roscoff, France. The papers cover types and inheritance, implementation issues, object-oriented systems and persistence, logic, and database programming languages.

The foci of the book are types in database languages, object-oriented database systems, and logic programming. The collection is intended for those who would like to explore the fundamental basis for current research in these areas. The book has been edited well, is coherent, and provides relatively balanced coverage of the topics. Some background is required to read some of the papers, but a second-level database course will more than suffice.