It is our pleasure to welcome you to the 33rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), taking place in Vienna, Austria. 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 core database technology and the application of this technology to develop infrastructure for information systems.
For the first time this year, the conference takes place on three days instead of three and a half. Each day starts out with a keynote, on Tuesday, September 25 by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, on Wednesday, September 26 by Eric Brewer, Professor at the University of California-Berkeley and Director of Intel Research Berkeley, and on Thursday, September 27 with the VLDB 10-year best paper award presentation.
The program committee that selected the papers consisted of 74 members for the Core Database Technology track, 65 members for the Infrastructure for Information Systems track, 21 members for the Industrial, Applications, and Experience track, and 15 members for the Demonstrations track. We accepted all papers that the program committee recommended as being of VLDB quality without setting any a priori quotas.
The conference received 668 submissions overall, including 594 to the three paper tracks. The Core Database technology track received 263 submissions out of which 46 (17.5%) were accepted; the Infrastructure for Information Systems track received 275 submissions out of which 45 (16.4%) were accepted; the Industrial, Applications, and Experience track received 56 submissions out of which 17 (30.4%) were accepted; and the Demonstrations track received 74 submissions out of which 29 (39.2%) were accepted. Compared to last year this shows that the community's rapid growth seems to be slowing: Submissions to the Core Database Technology track were down 21.3%, to the Infrastructure for Information Systems track 5.8%, to the Industrial, Applications, and Experience track 5.1%, and to the Demonstrations track 11.9%.
VLDB 2007 participated in the rollover process from SIGMOD 2007, and we received 28 submissions through this process (the rollover numbers are included in the totals above). Rollover papers were due two weeks after the regular submission deadline to give the authors additional time to address the comments of the SIGMOD reviewers. The rollover papers were re-reviewed by their three original reviewers from SIGMOD 2007 with one additional reviewer from VLDB 2007, resulting in 26 additional rollover reviewers for the Core Database Technology track and 21 additional reviewers for the Infrastructure for Information Systems track. 17 papers out of the rollover submissions were accepted (60.7%). We thank the SIGMOD 2007 PC Chair, Beng Chin Ooi, for his support and advice during the rollover process, and we thank the 47 selected reviewers from SIGMOD 2007 for participating in this additional round of reviews. We offered 36 regular papers that were submitted to VLDB 2007 the option to participate in the rollover process to SIGMOD 2008.
The conference has a very strong workshop program consisting of sixteen workshops selected by Georg Gottlob, H.V. Jagadish, and Krithi Ramamritham; the topics of the workshops range from traditional to emerging topics and are evidence of the breadth of the conference. Klaus Dittrich organized a workshop for PhD students. The conference has two interesting panels selected by the panel co-chairs Jim Gray, Matthias Jarke, and Sunita Sarawagi. Rounding up the technical program is a very strong tutorial program selected by Soumen Chakrabarti, Gerti Kappel, and Dennis Shasha; 7 out of 12 submitted tutorials were accepted. The tutorial co-chairs also decided to invite one additional tutorial by Phil Bernstein and Howard Ho. We thank all the presenters and workshop organizers for making the conference a success.
The program also includes a keynote session by Surajit Chaudhuri and Vivek Narasayya, the winners of the VLDB 10-year best paper award for their paper "An Efficient Cost-Driven Index Selection Tool for Microsoft SQL Server" from VLDB 1997. The awards committee consisted of Alon Halevy, Beng Chin Ooi, and Yannis Ioannidis.
We would like to thank all our colleagues who volunteered as program officers and in the program committee and as external reviewers. We would also like to thank Wolfgang Klas and Erich Neuhold, the general chairs of the conference, and the local arrangements chair, Bernhard Schandl, who were always available for information; we thank Ioana Manolescu for publicity for the conference, and Bernhard Schandl and Stefan Leitich for the excellent conference website. Our special gratitude goes to the Proceedings Chair, Christoph Koch, who edited the proceedings and produced an electronic version for inclusion in the SIGMOD digital library, and to Stefan Leitich who produced this conference brochure. Johann-Christoph Freytag as Liaison to the VLDB Endowment provided valuable advice throughout the process.
The whole reviewing process worked flawlessly due to the Microsoft Conference Management Tool (CMT); we thank Surajit Chaudhuri and the CMT support team for their support and help at any time of the day and night. We also thank the team from the University of Karlsruhe led by Jutta Mülle for their support with the Proceedings Builder Content Management. Invaluable administrative support through the whole process was provided by Stacey Shirk at Cornell.
Finally, we would like to thank all the authors who submitted papers, both accepted and rejected, and the attendees. This conference is taking place for you, and we hope you will get a glimpse of the vibrant research community it represents.
Johannes Gehrke
Technical Program Chair
Minos Garofalakis
Core Database Technology Program Chair
Divesh Srivastava
Infrastructure for Information Systems Program Chair
Karl Aberer, Anand Deshpande, and Dana Florescu
Industrial, Applications, and Experience Program Co-Chairs
Chee-Yong Chan, Venkatesh Ganti, and Carl-Christian Kanne
Demonstration Co-Chairs