as unnecessarily complicated and daunting to learn and manage relative to other open source components. As the ecosystem for database management evolves beyond the typical DBMS user base, opportunities are emerging for new programming models and new system components for data management and manipulation.

Architectural shifts in computing. While the variety of user scenarios is increasing, the computing substrates for data management are shifting

tant aspect of the price/performance metric of large systems. These hardware trends alone motivate a wholesale reconsideration of data-management software architecture.

These factors together signal an urgent, widespread need for new data-management technologies. There is an opportunity for making a positive difference. Traditionally, the database community is known for the practical relevance of its research; relational databases are emblematic of technol-

 

dramatically as well. At the macro scale, the rise of cloud computing services suggests fundamental changes in software architecture. It democratizes access to parallel clusters of computers; every programmer has the opportunity and motivation to design systems and services that scale out incrementally to arbitrary degrees of parallelism. At a micro scale, computer architectures have shifted the focus of Moore’s Law from increasing clock speed per chip to increasing the number of processor cores and threads per chip. In storage technologies, major changes are under way in the memory hierarchy due to the availability of more and larger on-chip caches, large inexpensive RAM, and flash memory. Power consumption has become an increasingly impor-

ogy transfer. But in recent years, the externally visible contribution of the database research community has not been as pronounced, and there is a mismatch between the notable expansion of the community’s portfolio and its contribution to other fields of research and practice. In today’s increasingly rich technical climate, the database community must recommit itself to impact and breadth. Impact is evaluated by external measures, so success involves helping new classes of users, powering new computing platforms, and making conceptual breakthroughs across computing. These should be the motivating goals for the next round of database research.

To achieve these goals, discussion at the 2008 Claremont Resort meeting

revolved around two broad agendas we call reformation and synthesis. The reformation agenda involves decon-structing traditional data-centric ideas and systems and reforming them for new applications and architectural realities. One part of this entails focusing outside the traditional RDBMS stack and its existing interfaces, emphasizing new data-management systems for growth areas (such as e-science). Another part of the reformation agenda involves taking data-centric ideas like declarative programming and query optimization outside their original context in storage and retrieval to attack new areas of computing where a data-centric mindset promises to yield significant benefit. The synthesis agenda is intended to leverage research ideas in areas that have yet to develop identifiable, agreed-upon system architectures, including data integration, information extraction, and data privacy. Many of these subcommunities of database research seem ready to move out of the conceptual and algorithmic phase to work together on comprehensive artifacts (such as systems, languages, and services) that combine multiple techniques to solve complex user problems. Efforts toward synthesis can serve as rallying points for research, likely leading to new challenges and breakthroughs, and promise to increase the overall visibility of the work.

Research Opportunities

After two days of intense discussion at the 2008 Claremont meeting, it was surprisingly easy for the group to reach consensus on a set of research topics for investigation in coming years. Before exploring them, we stress a few points regarding what is not on the list. First, while we tried to focus on new opportunities, we do not propose they be pursued at the expense of existing good work. Several areas we deemed critical were left off because they are already focus topics in the database community. Many were mentioned in previous reports and are the subject

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of significant efforts that require continued investigation and funding. Second, we kept the list short, favoring focus over coverage. Though most of us have other promising research topics we would have liked to discuss at greater length here, we focus on topics that

iLLustration by gLuekit