Inter- and intra-object parallelism have received an increasing amount of attention in the last few years by researchers in the area of object- oriented programming. At first glance, an object is very similar to a process which offers services to other processes and demands services from them. It has, however, transpired that object-oriented concepts cause problems when combined with parallelism. In programming languages, the introduction of parallelism and the synchronization constraints it brings with it can get in the way of code reusability. In databases, the combination of object orientation and parallelism requires, for example, a generalization of the transaction model, new approaches to the specification of information systems, an implementation model of object communication, and the design of an overall system architecture. There has been insufficient communication between researchers in programming languages and in databases on these issues. This text should be of interest to researchers and professionals working in software engineering, programming languages, and database systems.