Relational database systems are used by a wide range of user groups for a variety of data storage and management tasks. However, relational systems have two principal weaknesses: minimal data modelling capabilities and less than comprehensive behaviour description mechanisms. This presentation reviews recent work within the database research community that seeks to overcome these limitations, focusing in particular on enhanced structure modelling-object-oriented data models and systems-enhanced behaviour modelling-database programming languages, deductive databases, and active rules; integrated complementary technologies-deductive object-oriented databases.