Message from the Program Chairs

A warm welcome to the 35th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) in Lyon, France. The annual VLDB Conference is the premier international venue for the dissemination and exchange of ideas in the broad area of data management, both in the development and application of new technology. We hope you find both the conference and its location enjoyable.

Following tradition, the program contains keynote addresses. This year they are by Raghu Ramakrishnan, Yahoo! Research, and Johannes Gehrke, Cornell University.

A significant change occurred this year. We had 8 papers selected from the Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment. The transition of VLDB proceedings into a fully refereed journal and the radical transformation of the paper selection process are on their way.

The conference received 749 submissions overall. This represents a small increase over 2008. (Year 2008 saw a small increase over year 2007, which saw a substantial drop compared to 2006.) This is particularly encouraging since many other conferences are facing a reduction, substantial in some cases, in the number of submissions.

For the research tracks:

• The Core Database Technology track received 305 submissions, of which 51 (16.7 %) were accepted;
• The Infrastructure for Information Systems track received 257 submissions, of which 46 (17.9 %) were accepted;
• The Experiments and Analyses track received 13 submissions, of which 3 (23.1 %) were accepted;
• The Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment contributed 8 papers.

In addition,

• The Industrial Applications and Experience track received 59 submissions, of which 16 (27.1 %) were accepted; in addition, it includes 5 invited papers;
• The Demonstrations track received 107 submissions, of which 29 (27.1 %) were accepted.

The conference is preceded by a strong program of 14 workshops selected by Juliana Freire, Univ. Utah, and Yufei Tao, Chinese Univ. Hong Kong. Of these, the VLDB PhD workshop continues to be encouraged and embraced by the VLDB Program Chairs. It was chaired this year by Alfons Kemper, Techn. Univ. Muenchen, and Amélie Marian, Rutgers Univ.

The Tutorial Program Chairs, Anastasia Ailamaki, EPF Lausanne & Carnegie Mellon Univ., and Catriel Beeri, Hebrew Univ., selected 8 tutorials covering a wide range of database-related topics.

The Panel Chairs, Philip Bernstein, Microsoft Research, Stefano Ceri, Politecnico di Milano, and Sunita Sarawagi, IIT Bombay, selected two panels.

We decided to have a single Awards Committee this year that consisted of Susan Davidson, Univ. Pennsylvania, Johann-Christoph Freitag, Humboldt Univ. Berlin, C. Mohan, IBM Almaden.

The 10-year Best Paper is given this year to Peter Boncz, Stephan Manegold and Martin Kersten for their paper entitled ``Database Architecture Optimized for the New Bottleneck: Memory Access.''

We would like to thank all our colleagues who served on the program committees or acted as external reviewers.

We would also like to thank deeply

• Patrick Valduriez, INRIA Nantes, General Chair,
• Christian S. Jensen, Aalborg Univ. & Google, VLDB Liaison, and Gerhard Weikum, VLDB Endowment Chair, for their frequent and constructive advice.
• Mohand-Said Hacid, Univ. Lyon 1, and Jean-Marc Petit, INSA Lyon, very special thanks for undertaking the conference organization.
• Philippe Rigaux, Univ. Paris Dauphine, Proceedings Chair,
• Pierre Senellart, Télécom ParisTech, Submission Chair,
• Stéphane Coulondre, INSA Lyon, and Farouk Toumani, Univ. Blaise Pascal, the Publicity Chairs, and
• The CMT support team.