This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th British National Conference on Databases, BNCOD 14, held in Edinburgh, United Kingdom, in July 1996. The 13 revised papers presented in the book in full version together with two invited talks and three industrial abstracts were selected from a total of 47 submissions involving authors from 21 countries. The papers included are written by researchers and professionals from academia and industry; the volume is organized in topical sections on object-oriented databases, integrity issues, database performance and optimization, and database languages.