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