Introduction to the Third Biennial CIDR Conference 2007

Welcome to the third biennial CIDR conference, held from Jan 7 to Jan 10, 2007, in Asilomar and sponsored by the VLDB Foundation in co-operation with SIGMOD. CIDR is a systems-oriented conference, complementary in its mission to the mainstream database conferences like SIGMOD or VLDB, by emphasizing the system architecture perspective rather than mathematical models or algorithmic methods for highly specific issues.

The proceedings of the CIDR conference include different kinds of papers about innovative and risky approaches, systems-building experience, killer applications and "war stories", experimental studies, unsolved technical challenges, provocative position statements, and other off-the-beaten-path papers on the architecture and implementation of data-centric systems. In addition, we include, for the first time, short papers on system demonstrations that will be given at the conference. The program further includes the meanwhile traditional “gong show”, conducted by Natassa Ailamaki; conference participants are given 5-minute opportunities for expressing outrageous ideas and winning prizes for thoughtful and entertaining presentations.

Last but not least, the conference features three keynotes by very prominent speakers: David Tennenhouse, the former CEO of A9.com whose career also includes positions as a research manager at Intel and DARPA, Mike Stonebraker, MIT professor, entrepreneur, and database system pioneer, and Raghu Ramakrishnan, who has recently joined Yahoo! Research to spearhead their community management efforts. We are very grateful to these distinguished colleagues that they have taken taken time off from their busy schedules to share their insights with us.

The program committee received and reviewed 78 papers and 21 demo proposals, and it selected 34 full papers and 11 demo-oriented short papers for inclusion in the conference. Donald Kossmann chaired the demo program, I chaired the research paper program, and we both shared a very competent and engaged committee of 27 colleagues. Thank you very much to the entire program team for the excellent work and enjoyable collaboration.

Following our rules to continuously rejuvenate CIDR, one third of the PC members have newly joined this year, to replace the leaving third from last time. In the same spirit, Joe Hellerstein joined Mike Stonebraker and me in the team of the three general co-chairs, and we will have another rotation of this kind in two years from now. Fortunately, the previous co-chairs David DeWitt and Jim Gray kindly provided help on tasks unrelated to the program content; I am very grateful to David and Jim for their terrific work on the conference Website and the local arrangements.

For the first time in its history, CIDR has run an industrial sponsorship program. We very much appreciate the generous financial support by our sponsors: Google, HP, IBM, and Vertica. Many thanks go to Ugur Cetintemel who served as our industrial liaison and made this successful program possible. The received donations from our sponsors have been completely spent for a newly established scholarship program that covers the registration fees (incl. lodging and meals) of 15 students, all of them being co-authors of accepted papers or demos. We believe that such benefits to students are the best way of investing our sponsors’ money, to foster the continued growth of the data-systems research community and eventually benefiting industry again.

I hope you will enjoy the conference, if you are among its 120 participants, and you will find the papers in the proceedings insightful and stimulating.

Gerhard Weikum

Program Committee Chair