On Sunday 26 June 2016, the 35th edition of the annual ACM symposium on the theoretical foundations of data management, known as PODS, will kick off. PODS is held in its usual constellation, side-by-side with our friends and colleagues who do research on data management systems. Indeed, since 1991 already, PODS has been held jointly with the annual ACM SIGMOD international conference on data management systems in the renown spectacular event known as SIGMOD/PODS.

At this point I can mention only two special features of the upcoming PODS 2016:

• There is a special event to celebrate Ron Fagin, one of the founders of database theory, and still going strong as ever. Ron was educated in mathematical logic, and he had a big role in bringing the methods and techniques of mathematical logic, mostly the basic tools from the branch called model theory, into database theory. It goes both ways actually: a lot of database research contributes new results to model theory that are motivated by the data driven interests of data management research. Ron will give a talk himself at the new Gems of PODS session, designed to showcase to the wider SIGMOD community some of the many relevant results of database theory research.
  • For presentations see Gems of PODS page
• The keynote will be delivered by Moshe Y. Vardi, another icon of theoretical computer science who started his career in database theory. Moshe is also known in the wider computing community, as the provocative and transforming editor-in-chief of the Communications of the ACM. Moshe will talk about the great interplay between data management, logic (again), and automata theory, yielding powerful methods to optimize database queries. The field of automata theory is another one that has received a lot of inspiration from data management problems. We have seen a lot of exchange between database theory and automata theory researchers, with beautiful results. A great example is the work by Bojanczyk, David, Muscholl, Schwentick and Segoufin that will receive the 2016 ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon PODS Test-of-Time Award at SIGMOD/PODS 2016.

Welcome to this community blog on the principles of data management.  In the IT development world, "database theory" refers to an established set of normal forms for designing relational database schemas.  In the computer science research world, however, database theory has been growing for decades as a lively and active field of research in computer science.  The two annual flagship conferences, PODS and ICDT, attest to that, but you find us in many other places as well.  Increasingly, developing an understanding of the theoretical foundations of data management is no longer an isolated topic in databases. We are finding applications and new challenges everywhere: in the Semantic Web, in Big Data, in Programming Languages, actually, everywhere there is data to be managed!

This is a community blog. Indeed, our intent is that many people will sign up to contribute a blog post from time to time.  Please volunteer by registering.

This blog is one of the many initiatives that are coming out of a Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop on the Foundations of Data Management.  Many people from the database theory community got together there in April 2016 to discuss how to attract new people to our community, and how to make our beautiful body of knowledge and techniques better known.  Stay tuned for other workshop results such as a white paper, a series of videos, initiatives to make the PODS and ICDT conferences even better, and much more!