Text version
FUNDAMENTALS OF
Database 
Systems
SEVENTH EDITION
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FUNDAMENTALS OF 
Database 
Systems
SEVENTH EDITION
Ramez Elmasri
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
The University of Texas at Arlington
Shamkant B. Navathe
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on File
10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1
ISBN-10:         0-13-397077-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-13-397077-7
To Amalia  
and 
to Ramy, Riyad, Katrina, and Thomas
R. E.
To my wife Aruna for her love, support, and understanding 
to Rohan, Maya, and Ayush for bringing so much joy into our lives
and 
S.B.N.
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Preface
This  book  introduces  the  fundamental  concepts 
necessary for designing, using, and implementing 
database systems and database applications. Our presentation stresses the funda-
mentals of database modeling and design, the languages and models provided by the 
database management systems, and database system implementation techniques. 
The book is meant to be used as a textbook for a one- or two-semester course in 
database systems at the junior, senior, or graduate level, and as a reference book. Our 
goal is to provide an in-depth and up-to-date presentation of the most important 
aspects of database systems and applications, and related technologies. We assume 
that readers are familiar with elementary programming and data-structuring con-
cepts and that they have had some exposure to the basics of computer organization.
New to This Edition
The following key features have been added in the seventh edition:
■■ A reorganization of the chapter ordering (this was based on a survey of the 
instructors who use the textbook); however, the book is still organized so 
that the individual instructor can choose to follow the new chapter ordering 
or choose a different ordering of chapters (for example, follow the chapter 
order from the sixth edition) when presenting the materials.
■■ There are two new chapters on recent advances in database systems and big 
data processing; one new chapter (Chapter 24) covers an introduction to the 
newer class of database systems known as NOSQL databases, and the other 
new  chapter  (Chapter  25)  covers  technologies  for  processing  big  data, 
including MapReduce and Hadoop.
■■ The chapter on query processing and optimization has been expanded and 
reorganized into two chapters; Chapter 18 focuses on strategies and algo-
rithms for query processing whereas Chapter 19 focuses on query optimiza-
tion techniques.
■■ A second UNIVERSITY database example has been added to the early chap-
ters (Chapters 3 through 8) in addition to our COMPANY database example 
from the previous editions.
■■ Many of the individual chapters have been updated to varying degrees to include 
newer techniques and methods; rather than discuss these enhancements here, 
vii