Very Large Turnout for VLDB 2006

“The Country of Morning Calm” served as the majestic location for the 32nd International Conference on Very Large Databases, held September 12 to 15 in Seoul, Korea. A total of 687 people attended this year’s conference. Among the attendees were several members of Yahoo! Research.

Raghu Ramakrishnan had 3 research track papers, one that was presented. He was also on a panel at the 3rd International Workshop on Data Management for Sensor Networks, a workshop that focused on the challenges of data processing and management in networks of remote, wireless, battery-powered sensing devices, held in conjunction with VLDB this year.

Philip Bohannon presented one paper at VLDB and one at the First International VLDB Workshop on Clean Databases. Jayavel Shanmugasundaram participated in a panel entitled "A Unified Platform for Structured and Unstructured Data: Dream or Reality?" The other panelists included members from Google, IBM and SAP. Michael Mahoney gave a tutorial on “Randomized Algorithms for Matrices and Massive Data Sets.”

This year’s event saw a strong focus on querying, indexing, and search. There were 2 keynote talks by distinguished members of the data management community, Anant Jhingran of IBM and Vishal Sikka of SAP. Jhingran covered the importance of mashup style applications in the enterprise space. Sikka discussed the SAP approach to managing analytical, transactional and master data. Panel discussions covered the topics of mining structured vs. unstructured data, and challenges to the database community.