After holding 4 very successful events in USA and 2 in Europe, we are expanding to Asia.  The first XLDB satellite event in Asia will be held in Beijing, China on June 22-23, 2012. The event is open to everyone. For more information see the website: http://www.xldb-asia.org.

Note that this is a satellite event, which means, we are organizing it in addition to the main US-based event. This year XLDB conference & workshop will be held at Stanford University, California, most likely on Sept 11-12. More details coming soon.

Jacek

We have uploaded the photos from the XLDB 2011 conference and workshop, see:

• conference photos
• workshop photos

Volunteers willing to tag the photos are welcome

Jacek

Regards,
Jacek

• Are you working with big data, trying to make sense of billions of entries and petabytes of data? If you are involved in any type of large-scale analysis, tell us more about your use cases, your bottlenecks, problems you run into, solutions you came up with, features you would like to see in the future data management systems. Check the science benchmark and suggest how to improve it to capture your particular challenges. There are many researchers and solution providers actively involved in the XLDB activities; they are observing, they are listening, the more commonalities we find, the sooner someone will come up with an elegant, cost effective solution for our challenges!
• Are you involved in working on infrastructure for a large distributed system? Tell us your stories, share your experience and lessons learned. Very few of us have a good understanding what it really means to run a large scale, production cluster.
• Are you an academic researcher? Or perhaps you are involved in designing or implementing a scalable solution, be it a DBMS, a map/reduce-based solution, or something brand new. Check out the use cases we collected, read the reports from our past workshops (look for the links on the Events page), and start working on the solutions… fault tolerance, provenance, data uncertainty, spatial correlations, time series, … the list of challenges is quite long.
• Neither of the above? Perhaps you know a group working with large-scale data that has not heard about the XLDB yet? Let them know, bridge the gap!
• Or maybe you are active on social media sites? You can volunteer and help us increase XLDB presence there.
• Or maybe your company would be interested in sponsoring one of the next XLDB events?
• Or maybe you like designing webpages and can suggest how to improve this website? Or have an idea for a new topic we should cover?
• Or maybe you are a good scribe and can help us write the next XLDB workshop report?
• There are many many ways to get involved…
• None of the above? Just curious about extremely large databases and data management? Follow the blog. Come to the conference.

Best!
Jacek

• continue using xldb-l mailing list for all major announcements,
• post quick announcements as well as discuss longer topics through the XLDB blog (anyone can add “comments”).

Adding comments to a blog is trivial, you don’t even need to register!

So, we encourage all of you to follow the XLDB blog, e.g. by subscribing to our RSS feed.

Do you have a suggestion or a comment on how to make the communication better? Post a comment to this blog, or email us.

Regards,
Jacek

So, what about the next conference? The 2-day conference length is fairly non-controversial – almost everybody wants to stick with 2 days, only some would prefer 2.5 and very few would like to see full 3 days. Overall, in terms of lenghts of various sessions, we were told: “keep it the same”, “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it”. We should definitely not introduce peer-reviewed papers (yes, we heard you!). Most people do not want parallel tracks. Introducing birds of feather and real demos seems very welcome. Short surveys are welcome too. But when it comes to tutorials and 15-min “open talks”.. errr… the answers vary from “absolutely yes” to “absolutely no” with everything in between, so that is a tough one!

Now, what about the topics? Big-web companies were well covered already, and more diversity is needed next year, telecom, manufacturing, healthcare were mentioned. Many asked us to bring hardware people and ask them to cover their long term plans and hardware trends. Will do!

New activities? By far the most highly demanded activity is collecting test cases, use cases, and starting to put together “reference architectures”. We will certainly look into this. (Hey, look at the menu above this blog, did you notice the “use cases” section? We hope to grow it substantially, maybe YOU have a use case you’d be willing to share with us?)

We observed mixed feelings inside the community about considered satellite workshop in Asia… surely it’d be useful to connect with that community, but we were warned by many about language barrier, visa issues, long travel, and so, we will probably take it easy and do more research before going ahead…

The feeback received is super useful, it gives us many ideas what topics to introduce, how to fine-tune future XLDB events and what to focus on.

Stay tuned, we have already started thinking about the next event.

Jacek Becla
XLDB-2011 Organizing Committee Chair

We’re in desperate need for a convenient communication tool, as our main mailing list grows, and the number of topics required some discussions goes up, we can no longer rely on the mailing list alone. So, we created this blog. We expect it to become the main one-stop shop for all the XLDB related information. Notice that we seeded it with the Use Cases we collected so far, and the Science Benchmark.

Stay tuned for more!

The SLAC-XLDB Team: Jacek Becla, Kian-Tat Lim, and Daniel Wang