Toby J. Teorey is a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Arizona, Tucson, and a Ph.D. in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was general chair of the 1981 ACM SIGMOD Conference and program chair for the 1991 Entity-Relationship Conference. Professor Teorey’s current research focuses on database design and data warehousing, OLAP, advanced database systems, and performance of computer networks. He is a member of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society. Elizabeth O'Neil is also a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. She serves as a consultant to Sybase IQ in Concord, Massachusetts, and has worked with a number of other corporations, including Microsoft and Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. From 1980 to 1998 she implemented and managed new hardware and software labs in the Computer Science Department of the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Patrick O'Neil is a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He is responsible for a number of important research results in transactional performance and disk access algorithms, and he holds patents for his work in these and other database areas. Author of "The Set Query Benchmark" (in The Benchmark Handbook for Database and Transaction Processing Systems, also from Morgan Kaufmann) and an area editor for Information Systems, O'Neil is also an active industry consultant who has worked with a number of prominent companies, including Microsoft, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Praxis, Price Waterhouse, and Policy Management Systems Corporation. Markus Schneider is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Florida and holds a doctoral degree in Computer Science from the University of Hagen, Germany. He is author of a monograph in the area of spatial databases and of a German textbook on implementation concepts for database systems, and has published about 40 articles on database systems. He is on the editorial board of GeoInformatica. Graeme C. Simsion has over 25 years experience in information systems as a DBA, data modeling consultant, business systems designer, manager, and researcher. He is a regular presenter at industry and academic forums, and is currently a Senior Fellow with the Department of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. Graham C. Witt is an independent consultant with over 30 years of experience in assisting enterprises to acquire relevant and effective IT solutions. His clients include major banks and other financial institutions; businesses in the insurance, utilities, transport and telecommunications sectors; and a wide variety of government agencies. A former guest lecturer on Database Systems at University of Melbourne, he is a frequent presenter at international data management conferences.