Introduction

DURING the past decade, we have experienced an explosive growth in data communications and networking in which terminals, computers, and computer networks are connected together via communication lines to share databases and computing resources. However, due to the lack of understanding of how to design efficient distributed databases and distributed processing systems, most of the systems are designed on an ad hoc basis. Thus, no standardization is yet available. With the advent of data communications, as well as the low-cost VLSI technology, intelligent memories, intelligent interfaces, etc., we do envision that distributed database and distributed processing development will experience an explosive growth in the 80´s.