The book's main focus follows the authors' engineering model: A survey of parallel query optimization techniques for requests involving multi-way joins; A new technique for a join operation that can be adopted in the local optimization stage; A framework for recovery in parallel database systems using the ACTA formalism; The architectural details of NCR's new Petabyte multimedia database system; A description of the Super Database Computer (SDC- II); A case study for a shared-nothing parallel database server that analyzes and compares the effectiveness of five data placement techniques.