Dr. Mark L. Gillenson has been practicing, researching, teaching, writing, and, most importantly, thinking, about data and database management for over 50 years, split between working for the IBM Corporation and being a professor in the academic world. While working for IBM he designed databases for IBM's corporate headquarters, consulted on database issues for some of IBM's largest customers, taught database management at the prestigious IBM Systems Research Institute in New York, and conducted database seminars throughout the United States and on four continents. In one such seminar, he taught introduction to database to an IBM development group that went on to develop IBM's first relational database management system products, SQL/DS. Dr. Gillenson conducted some of the earliest studies on data and database administration and has written extensively about that subject as well as about database design. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Database Management, with which he has been associated since its inception.

This is the third edition of his third book on database management, all published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Dr. Gillenson is currently University Research Professor in the Fogelman College of Business and Economics of The University of Memphis. He is also the Director of the UofM's Systems Testing Excellence Program (STEP). His degrees are from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and The Ohio State University. Oh, and speaking of interesting kinds of data, as a graduate student Dr. Gillenson invented the world's first computerized facial compositor and codeveloped an early computer graphics system that, among other things, was used to produce some of the special effects in the first Star Wars movie.