Ladjel Bellatreche is organizing a special issue in New Trends in Physical Data Warehouse Design for the journal of Distributed and Parallel Databases. Submissions are through the journal’s online system. You can read the call for papers on EventSeer.

The CASCON 2008 call for papers is out. CASCON is a generic Computer Science conference hosted by IBM in Toronto. The list of topics covered is pretty broad: software engineering, databases, HCI, Web, Grid Computing, and so on.

The French conference Base de données avancées 2008 (BDA) published its web site. BDA stands for advanced databases. The conference will be held in Ardèche.

According to Curt Monash, few people should be buying high-end Database management systems:

There are relatively few applications that wouldn’t run perfectly well on PostgreSQL or EnterpriseDB today. (…)

What’s more, these mid-range database management systems can have significant advantages over their high-end brethren. The biggest is often price, for licenses and maintenance alike. Beyond that, they can be much easier to administer then their more complex counterparts. (…)

And what these mid-range DBMS don’t do today, they likely will do soon. (…)

EnterpriseDB is equal or superior in every way I can think of to Oracle7, a few security certifications perhaps excepted.

If you work for an organization that has expensive contracts with Oracle or Microsoft for their DBMS, it is most certainly in vain.

Meanwhile, the world of open source Business Intelligence is getting more interesting every day. We now have Pentaho Mondrian, Jedox, Birt, Enhydra Octopus, and so on. In 2005, I asked whether open source was ready for Business Intelligence. The question seems less controversial in 2008, doesn’t it?

Most of the database industry has been commoditized. If you stick around with these old schemas, you lose.

The 17th International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering will be held in Los Angeles (USA). It appears to be a pretty generic hybrid conference, one half software engineering, one half data engineering.

VLDB 2008 will be held in New Zealand next year. VLDB is one of the most prestigious database conference.

I wish I could realistically attend this. They are holding a tribute to Jim Gray, the famous database researcher. Jim has been lost at sea. We cannot conclude he is dead, though it becomes increasingly difficult to find an explanation for his disappearance. Mike Stonebraker, of Postgresql fame, will give a talk on “Why Jim Got the Turing Award.” Should be interesting.

I have written about Jim quite a bit here: Jim Gray missing at sea, What is infinite storage? , Science in an exponential world, That’s why I tinker, A “Measure of Transaction Processing” 20 Years Later, ACM Queue - A Conversation with Tim Bray, and so on.

Of all database researchers, Jim is the one who has had the biggest impact on my research and my teaching. Indeed, the cool thing about Jim is that he did not work on abstract nonsense. You can actually take his papers, and give the gist of them to your students, and you will have helped your students a lot.