Designed specifically for a single semester, first course on Database Systems, there are 4 aspects that differentiate our book from the rest. * Simplicity - Normally, the technology of database systems can be quite difficult to understand. There are so many terms, acronyms and buzzwords associated with the technology that people find highly complicated. This book explains each of these with very simple examples, lucid language and a lot of illustrations. * Coverage - The book covers all the essential aspects of database systems and also covers the areas of RDBMS. There are very few books, which cover all the theory and practice of database systems. This book covers both these aspects. * Illustrative approach - The book contains over 400 diagrams - about one per page. This makes this book unique in terms of its visual approach. With this, even the most difficult concepts become a lot easier to understand. * Modern topics - The book covers all the modern topics, such as OODBMS, database systems and the Internet, Data warehousing, Mobile databases, Multimedia databases, Deductive databases.