A new landscape for distributed and parallel data management

Abstract

The inaugural issue of Distributed and Parallel Databases (DAPD) appeared in 1993. It was an outcome of this journal’s founding editor Dr. Ahmed Elmagarmid’s vision. In the first editorial, he noted the need to provide a high quality forum to “publish original results related to databases and systems that use distributed or highly parallel platforms, parallel algorithms, issues resulting from parallelism and distribution of application and data.” DAPD indeed started at the right time, and its relevance grew as database technologies were increasingly deployed in large-scale distributed infrastructures and used parallelism and distribution to improve scale and performance. DAPD faithfully served this mission and made a space among database journals with its focus. Ahmed was early in identifying the topics that grew in importance, such as interoperability in multidatabase systems, object-oriented databases, knowledge bases, and managing biological, spatial, scientific and statistical data. Ahmed carried the ball as the Editor-in-Chief (EIC) for over 15 years, and then as a co-EIC once he called upon me to join him four years ago. A couple of years ago, Ahmed took up a significant leadership position at the Qatar Foundation, and along with that, significant responsibilities. So it is understandable that Ahmed has decided to pass on the DAPD leadership role to others. I am confident that the database community will continue to receive the benefits of Ahmed’s leadership and service, but DAPD owes its immense gratitude for all that he has done for this journal. This occasion also affords me a privilege to welcome one of the best known database researchers, Divyakant (Divy) Agrawal. Divy has been on the faculty of Computer Science Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara since 1987 where he currently serves as a Professor of Computer Science. He is an active