Review of "Data base management systems, by Alfonso F. Cardenas", Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1979.

The author has been unquestionably successful in accomplishing his objectives, the most outstanding of which is an "illustrative...critical, and quantative" presentation of representative samples (chapters 5 through 9) of the network, hierarchic, inverted tree, and relational approaches to generalized data base management system (GDBMS). The common example carried through these chapters was a well chosen and effective vehicle for showing the commonalities, differences, strengths, and weaknesses of the approaches. The fundamentals of file organization and data base concepts (chapters 2 and 3), built upon some of the author's previously published work, preceed a short economic and architectual tabulation of marketed systems (chapter 4). The presentation of the last generalized data base management approach, IBM's experimental System R, is followed by a one chapter treatment of supporting concepts, functional dependencies, and normalization.