Review of "Data base management systems, by Alfonso F. Cardenas", Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1979.
Rochester Murphy · ACM SIGIR Forum · 1979
The author has been unquestionably successful in accomplishing his objectives, the most outstanding of which is an "illustrative...critical, and quantative" presentation of representative samples (chapters 5 through 9) of the network, hierarchic, inverted tree, and relational approaches to generalized data base management system (GDBMS). The common example carried through these chapters was a well chosen and effective vehicle for showing the commonalities, differences, strengths, and weaknesses of the approaches. The fundamentals of file organization and data base concepts (chapters 2 and 3), built upon some of the author's previously published work, preceed a short economic and architectual tabulation of marketed systems (chapter 4). The presentation of the last generalized data base management approach, IBM's experimental System R, is followed by a one chapter treatment of supporting concepts, functional dependencies, and normalization.