D. McCawley), fuzzy logic, and applications of logic, including multi-valued logics, to databases. Transaction Management Beginning in 1981, Mr. McGoveran began consulting on the design of transaction processing systems, including distributed transactions. Investigations into the complexity and cost of distributed transactions, as well as the difficulty of maintaining transactional consistency in online applications led to research into alternatives to the traditional transaction models that used pessimistic concurrency control and enforced ACID properties. McGoveran defined physical transactions as the unit of recovery, logical transactions as the unit of consistency, and business transactions as the unit of audit The resulting adaptive transaction model introduces a transaction intrinsic definition of consistency, deferring the decision to combine the results of two or more transactions. His work on transaction management resulted in the award of US Patent No 7,103,597. Relational Data Model and Related Research McGoveran's research on E.F. Codd's relational model has focused on the issues of data modeling (database design), missing information, and view updating. The last two are considered by some database researchers to be the most difficult and controversial problems in relational database research. Having worked on the design and development of several early large scale, distributed, commercial relational database applications, McGoveran sought to improve upon the science of database design. This work lead to the development of new analyses of and solutions to the problem of "missing information" and avoiding the use of nulls and therefore many-valued logic the specification and uses of relation predicates (relation or set membership functions) as an application of Leibniz' Law a new design principle (with C. J. Date) now known as the Principle of Orthogonal Design (POOD) His work on logic applied to relational databases and on design without nulls (1993) has been republished several times. McGoveran tackled the problem of view updating with Christopher J. Date starting in 1993 after having developed methods for reversible schema migration for clients on Wall Street. His solution, based on relation predicates, formed the basis for the algorithms found in The Third Manifesto (Christopher J. Date, Hugh Darwen) for updating virtual relations (e.g., views). Date has credited McGoveran with originally suggesting the basic idea for the view updating approach, and which Hugh Darwen says represented a major shift in thinking on the issue. This work has resulted in two patents (U.S. Patent 7,620,664 and U.S. Patent 7,263,512). Some of McGoveran's work on databases is discussed at Fabian