Patrick O'Neil is a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He is responsible for a number of important research results in transactional performance and disk access algorithms, and he holds patents for his work in these and other database areas. Author of "The Set Query Benchmark" (in The Benchmark Handbook for Database and Transaction Processing Systems, also from Morgan Kaufmann) and an area editor for Information Systems, O'Neil is also an active industry consultant who has worked with a number of prominent companies, including Microsoft, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Praxis, Price Waterhouse, and Policy Management Systems Corporation.