XPS: A High Performance Parallel Database Server

The Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Data Engineering is published quarterly and is distributed to all TC members. Its scope includes the design, implementation, modelling, theory and application of database systems and their technology. Letters, conference information, and news should be sent to the Editor-in-Chief. Papers for each issue are solicited by and should be sent to the Associate Editor responsible for the issue. Opinions expressed in contributions are those of the authors and do not necessarily reeect the positions of the TC on Data Engineering, the IEEE Computer Society, or the authors' organizations. Membership in the TC on Data Engineering is open to all current members of the IEEE Computer Society who are interested in database systems. The Technical Committee on Data Engineering will have an election to select a new TC Chair. Our current Chair, Rakesh Agrawal, has completed his term. I urge current members of the ICDE to help select a new TC chair by participating in the nomination process and subsequently the election. (Note, however, that you must be a IEEE Computer Society and TCDE member to participate.) Amit Sheth is chairing the nominating committee for this election and is joined by Nick Cercone and Ron Sacks-Davis, all currently serving on the TCDE Executive Committee. Nominations close on August 30, 1997 so you must act promptly to participate. The election will be held this fall. The new TC chair, upon election, will appoint a new executive committee. A nomination form is included in this issue of the bulletin on page 44. You may use a paper copy of this form for your nominations, and send it to Amit Sheth at the address listed on the form. Members can also send in nominations electronically via email. An electronic nomination form has been posted to the Data Engineering Bulletin web page Data mining, data warehouses, decision support, these are the terms that our research community uses to describe the quest to query ever larger databases. As fast as our new hardware is, the drive for useable information constantly pushes the query processing envelop toward the need to exploit parallelism. The current issue is on parallelism in industrial database systems. Betty Salzberg has "gone the extra mile" in soliciting these papers. Indeed, she has succeeded in gathering papers on parallelism in ve systems. This is no small accomplishment given the deadline pressures and implementation focus of development engineers …