Dr. Mark L. Gillenson has been practicing, researching, teaching, writing, and, most importantly, thinking, about data and database management for over twentyfive 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 one of 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 the 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 his third book on database management, all published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. He has also written Strategic Planing, Systems Analysis, and Database Design (1984) with Robert Goldberg and Database Step-by-Step (1985, 1990). Dr. Gillenson is currently a professor of MIS in the Fogelman College of Business and Economics of The University of Memphis. 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 andcodeveloped an early computer graphics system that, among other things, was used to produce some of the special effects in the first Star Wars movie.