The Seattle Report on Database Research

From the inception of the field, academic database research has strongly influenced the database industry and vice versa. The database community, both research and industry, has grown substantially over the years. The relational database market alone has revenue upwards of $50B. On the academic front, database researchers continue to be recognized with significant awards. Over the last decade, our research community pioneered the use of columnar storage, which is used in all commercial data analytic platforms. Database systems offered as cloud services have witnessed explosive growth. Hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP) systems are now an important segment of the industry. Furthermore, memory-optimized data structures, modern compilation, and code-generation have significantly enhanced performance of traditional database engines. All data platforms have embraced SQL-style APIs as the predominant way to query and retrieve data. Database researchers have played an important part in influencing the evolution of streaming data platforms as well as distributed key-value stores. A new generation of data cleaning and data wrangling technology is being actively explored.