Introduction to the Second CIDR Conference

 

By

Michael Stonebraker

 

 

 

Welcome to the second biennial CIDR conference, sponsored by the VLDB Foundation in co-operation with SIGMOD.  CIDR will continue to be held every two years at Asilomar, so start thinking about your contribution to the CIDR conference in January, 2007.

 

As many of you know, the purpose of CIDR is to provide a high quality publication venue for papers that are visionary and/or pragmatic.  Such papers are not well received by the program committees of traditional data base conferences. The current proceedings contains the 26 accepted papers, which were carefully selected by the CIDR program committee from 87 submitted papers. 

 

I am especially pleased that we have a session on Òwar storiesÓ.  There is a lot of ÒfolkloreÓ on how to architect real systems, that is rarely written down.  Hence, people in our field often donÕt know how to build real products.  CIDR expects to continue to encourage papers in this area.  Hopefully, in the future we will get more papers in this important area. 

 

I am also pleased that many of the research groups that are designing innovative prototypes are represented at CIDR.  Hopefully, CIDR will be the venue for reporting on such prototypes, while they are still in the early stages of construction, so that peer feedback is possible in a timely fashion. 

 

Lastly, I am delighted that this proceedings contains a selection of papers that propose fairly non-traditional designs for open issues, such as information integration and dealing with both text and structured data.  This should stimulate much discussion on how to best move forward in these difficult areas.

 

I would like especially to thank the program committee which consisted of Anastassia Ailamaki, Phil Bernstein, Mike Carey, Surajit Chaudhuri, Mitch Cherniack, Sophie Cluet, Dave DeWitt, Daniela Florescu, Mike Franklin, Hector Garcia-Molina, Dieter Gawlick, Goetz Garefe, Laura Haas, Alon Halevy, Joe Hellerstein, Martin Kersten, Donald Koosmann, Sam Madden, Rene Miller, Jeff Naughton, Hamid Pirahesh, Hans Schek,  Avi Silbershatz, Gerhard Weikum, Jennifer Widom, and Stan Zdonik for their hard work and prompt attention to the reviewing process.

 

For those of you who are keeping score, notice that 1/3 of the 2003 program committee has been replaced by Ònew bloodÓ.  We looked for the best young minds when we made our selection of new members, and continued our tradition of never having a prospective PC member refuse our invitation.  We expect that it will be considered a real honor to be asked to serve. Also, we expect PC members to serve for three conferences and then be replaced.  In addition, Gerhard Weikum has replaced Jim Gray in the ÒtroikaÓ of organizers, joining David Dewitt and myself.  We also expect organizers to serve for three conferences and then step aside.  In this way, we ensure continuity of aims and practices within the conference.