Abraham Silberschatz (Ph.D. the State University of New York at Stony Brook) is a Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. Prior to joining Yale, he was the Vice President of the Information Sciences Research Center at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. Prior to that, he held a chaired professorship in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include operating systems, database systems, real-time systems, storage systems, network management, and distributed systems. Prof. Silberschatz is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. He received the 2002 IEEE Taylor L. Booth Education Award, the 1998 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, the 1997 ACM SIGMOD Contribution Award, and the IEEE Computer Society Outstanding Paper award. He is an author of the textbook Operating System Concepts. Henry F. Korth (Ph.D. Princeton University) is Weiseman Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University. Before joining Lehigh, he was Director of Database Principles Research at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. His research interests include XML data management, web-based data, main-memory database systems, real-time systems, parallel systems and other topics. Before joining Bell Laboratories, Prof. Korth was a Vice President of Panasonic Technologies and Director of the Matsushita Information Technology Laboratory. Prior to that, he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, and a Research Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Prof. Korth is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. S. Sudarshan (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, Madison) is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Prior to joining IIT Bombay, he was a Member of Technical Staff in the Database Research Group at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. Prof. Sudarshan is an author of over 60 papers in different areas of database systems, and holds 13 patents. His current research interests include query processing and optimization, authorization, and keyword querying of databases. In addition to being the architect of several software systems dealing with database internals, he has also been responsible for building and maintaining a variety of database applications used in IIT Bombay.