After a decade of major technical and theoretical advancements in the area, the scope for exploitation of database technology has never been greater. Neither has the challenge. This volume contains the proceedings of the 17th British National Conference on Databases (BNCOD 2000), held at the University of Exeter in July 2000. In selecting the quality papers presented here, the programme committee was p- ticularly interested in the demands being made on the technology by emerging application areas, including web applications, push technology, multimedia data, and data warehousing. The concern remains the same: satisfaction of user - quirements on quality and performance. However, with increasing demand for timely access to heterogeneous data distributed on an unregulated Internet, new challenges are presented. Our three invited speakers develop the theme for the conference, considering new dimensions concerning user requirements in accessing distributed, hete- geneous information sources. In the ?rst paper presented here, Gio Wiederhold re?ects on the tension between requirements for, on the one hand, precision and relevance and on the other completeness and recall in relating data from heterogeneous resources. In resolving this tension in favour of the former, he maintains that this will fundamentally a?ect future research directions. Sharma Chakravarthy adds another dimension to the requirement on inf- mation, namely timeliness. He shares a vision of just-in-time information de- vered by a push technology based on reactive capabilities. He maintains that this requires a paradigm shift to a user-centric view of information.