Abstract: Major advances in optical fiber transmission and switching technology have enabled the development of very high speed networks with data rates of the order of gigabits per second. It is anticipated that in the future, wide area gigabit networks will interconnect database servers around the globe creating extremely powerful distributed information systems. In this paper, we examine the implications of such a high speed network on data access and sharing techniques and propose a lock-based concurrency control protocol and a log-based recovery protocol that ensures data consistency in gigabit-networked databases. Both protocols exploit the characteristics of a gigabit network to enhance the performance of the database system and, in particular, the fact that the size of the message is less of a concern than the number of sequential phases of message passing.