The end of the 20th century saw tremendous research devoted to the design of database systems for real-time applications, called real-time database systems (RTDBS), where transactions are associated with deadlines on their completion times, and some of the data objects in the database are associated with temporal constraints on their validity. Examples of important applications of RTDBS include stock trading systems, navigation systems and computer integrated manufacturing. Different transaction scheduling algorithms and concurrency control protocols have been proposed to satisfy transaction timing data temporal constraints. Other design issues important to the performance of a RTDBS are buffer management, index accesses and I/O scheduling. This book summarizes important research results in this area, and should serves as a reference for practitioners, researchers and educators of real-time systems and database systems.