This book presents the refereed proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Extending Database Technology, EDBT'96, held in Avignon, France in March 1996. The 31 full revised papers included were selected from a total of 178 submissions; also included are some industrial-track papers, contributed by partners of several ESPRIT projects. The volume is organized in topical sections on data mining, active databases, design tools, advanced DBMS, optimization, warehousing, system issues, temporal databases, the web and hypermedia, performance, workflow management, database design, and parallel databases.