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Database needs are changing, driven by the Internet and increasing amounts of scientific and sensor data. In this article, the authors propose research into several important new directions for database management systems.

ANSI SQL-92 [MS, ANSI] defines Isolation Levels in terms of phenomena: Dirty Reads, Non-Repeatable Reads, and Phantoms. This paper shows that these phenomena and the ANSI SQL definitions fail to properly characterize several popular isolation levels, including the standard locking implementations of the levels covered. Ambiguity in the statement of the phenomena is investigated and a more formal statement is arrived at; in addition new phenomena that better characterize isolation types are introduced. Finally, an important multiversion isolation type, called Snapshot Isolation, is defined.

The database research community is rightly proud of success in basic research, and its remarkable record of technology transfer. Now the field needs to radically broaden its research focus to attack the issues of capturing, storing, analyzing, and presenting the vast array of online data. The database research community should embrace a broader research agenda -- broadening the definition of database management to embrace all the content of the Web and other online data stores, and rethinking our fundamental assumptions in light of technology shifts. To accelerate this transition, we recommend changing the way research results are evaluated and presented. In particular, we advocate encouraging more speculative and long-range work, moving conferences to a poster format, and publishing all research literature on the Web., Comment: 20 pages in HTML; an original in MSword at http://research.microsoft.com/~gray/Asilomar_DB_98.doc