This is a good text which combines a clear introductory perspective, a panorama of the currently available commercial offerings and a reasonably unbiased presentation of the many different approaches to the problem. Finally, application considerations are investigated. This first volume had something, but it was 1982 material and as such not comparable with the recent advances in the field. E.g. the simple fact of having object identity was considered as a feature suggesting object orientation. This turns out to be a system with OO-style class definitions where queries cannot be expressed declaratively and have to be implemented by writing methods for the objects they apply to.
Types are either atomic or built with constructors like set, bag, list, array, structure.
Where query language that returns a set of values. Contains copies of the three manifestos and a few pointers to books and online resources. Contains background on ODMG, a list of members, amendments to the standard and, sometime soon, a list of compliant commercial products. Contains a list of his publications and postscript for many of them, including entire book chapters. An archive of technical articles on databases with various searchable indexes.