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
1, 3–7
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
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