RDBMS's have evolved to an extent that they are used to manage almost all of traditional business data in a robust fashion. Nevertheless, a large fraction of unstructured and semi-structured data continues to be managed by file systems. As companies increasingly depend on non-traditional data such as web pages and images for their daily business operations, it becomes more and more important to provide higher degree of integrity, security, and reliability to the data stored in file systems. DataLinks technology developed at IBM Almaden Research center achieves this by providing a vital integration between RDBMS and file system. It enables DBMS to manage files residing in file systems as though they are logically within the database. Current DataLinks technology supports only read access to external files that are being managed by DBMS. This severely restricts the applicability of DataLinks technology in transaction oriented and/or e-business applications. Traditional database sys...