ABSTRACTS from other ACM Publications.

The article presents abstracts of research papers related to information technology. The research paper "Transactions and Consistency in Distributed Database Systems," discusses the concepts of transaction and data consistency for distributed computing systems. The cases of partitioned data, where fragments of a file are stored at multiple nodes, and replicated data, where a file is replicated at several nodes, are discussed. It has been argued that the distribution and replication of data should be transparent to the programs which use the data. That is, the programming interface should provide location transparency, replica transparency, and failure transparency. According to the research paper "On the Correct Translation of Update Operations on Relational Views," most relational database systems provide a facility for supporting user views. Permitting this level of abstraction has the danger, however, that update requests issued by a user within the context of his view may not translate correctly into equivalent updates on the underlying database.