The last twenty-five years of commercial DBMS development can be summed up in a single phrase, One size fits all. In this paper we argue that that this concept is no longer applicable to the DBMS market, and that the commercial world will fracture into a collection of independent engines, some of which may be unified by a common front end parser. We use examples from the stream processing market as well as the data warehouse market and to bolster our claims.

Michael Stonebraker
Michael Stonebraker obtained a B.S.E.E. degree from Princeton University in 1965 and a PhD from the University of Michigan in 1971.
Dr. Stonebraker has been a pioneer of data base research and technology for more than a quarter of a century. He was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, and the object-relational DBMS, POSTGRES. These prototypes were developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Stonebraker was a Professor of Computer Science for twenty five years. More recently at M.I.T. he was a co-architect of the Aurora stream processing engine. He is the founder of three venture-capital backed startups, which commercialized these prototypes. Presently he serves as Chief Technology Officer of StreamBase Systems, Inc., which is commercializing Aurora. These prototypes have had a significant impact on DBMS systems in the marketplace today.
Professor Stonebraker is the author of scores of research papers on data base technology, operating systems and the architecture of system software services. He was awarded the ACM System Software Award in 1992, for his work on INGRES. Additionally, he was awarded the first annual Innovation award by the ACM SIGMOD special interest group in 1994, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997. He is an ACM Fellow and is presently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at M.I.T., where he is working primarily on a novel DBMS architecture, oriented toward applications which are read-oriented.

For the past three decades, those of us in the database field have principally focused attention and significant effort on technology for storing, querying, accessing, and securing data with well-known structure in high-performance data management systems. Our focus has been riveted on performance, performance, performance. The world has changed dramatically since the early days of database management systems, however. The dynamics of DBMSes have changed, moving from supporting back office systems, to front offices, to web-based systems. Computer architecture has changed, as we have moved from systems where 256K was a large size memory, disk drives were very expensive, most processors were water-cooled, and screens glowed with green characters. Not only has more data been produced in the last several years than in all previous history, but more and more of it is in digital form. Accelerated pace and higher expectations driven by competitive necessity have changed the nature of database solutions from well-understood batch-oriented processing to real-time, ad hoc query on continuously streaming data. All these changes are coming together to create a new set of challenges for the decade ahead. In this presentation, we will talk about the top five of these challenges in the database area.

Pat Selinger
Pat Selinger is an IBM Fellow and vice president, Area Strategy - Information and Interaction, Research. She graduated in 1975 from Harvard with a PhD in Applied Mathematics. Dr. Selinger was a leading member of the IBM Research team that produced the world's first relational database system and established the basic architecture for the highly successful DB2 database product family. Dr. Selinger's innovative work on cost-based query optimization for relational databases has now been adopted by nearly all relational database vendors, and is now taught in virtually every university database course. Dr. Selinger ran the IBM Almaden Research computer science department and then established and managed the Database Technology Institute whose mission is to accelerate technology into IBM's database products. The DBTI organization invented and partnered with IBM development to deliver a number of fundamental technologies in DB2 for OS/390, IMS, and DB2 for Linux, Unix and Windows. In 1994, she received the title of IBM Fellow, an honor accorded only to the top 50 technical experts in IBM, for her exceptional technical work and leadership in relational databases. Dr. Selinger joined IBM's Information Management division in 1997 as Vice President, Information Management Architecture and Technology, driving the technical strategy across IBM's DB2 product family. Now in IBM's Research Division, Dr. Selinger is currently responsible for establishing and coordinating world-wide strategic research in the division's information management, unstructured information and user interface technology areas. Dr. Selinger was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1999 and in 2004 was inducted into the Hall of Fame for WITI.

An increasing number of companies want to improve product traceability for several reasons: to meet stricter government regulations about food and medical safety, to cope with ever-stronger consumer demands to know exactly what they are buying, and to improve and protect the company's brand value through more transparent business operations. Two aspects of traceability are technically important: (1) techniques for tracing the events associated with the goods a company handles at all necessary points of the business operation, possibly through the use of IC tags and tag readers; and (2) ways to store, manage, and use the collected logs of events either to cope with problems or to improve business processes. We first review currently available traceability systems by considering examples from realworld situations. After that, we discuss the likely directions and possibilities of next-generation traceability systems.

Yoji Taniguchi
Yoji Taniguchi obtained a master degree from the Graduate School of Science and Engineering at Waseda University in 1989 and a PhD from the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at Osaka University in 2001. He joined Systems Development Laboratory of Hitachi, Ltd. in 1989. He has designed and built Decision Support Systems, Human-Machine Interaction Systems, Database Applications for Business Systems. Recently he engages in developping traceability systems with divisions as a senior researcher.