 and servers</a>
            </span>
          </dt>
        </dl>
      </div>
      <p>The first step in selecting a database system is figuring out what the
choices are. Decades of research and real-world deployment have produced
countless systems. We need to organize them somehow to reduce the number
of options.</p>
      <p>One obvious way to group systems is to use the common labels that
vendors apply to them. The buzzwords here include "network,"
"relational," "object-oriented," and "embedded," with 