I’d rather play golf

This past Friday we received word from Christian S. Jensen, the Workshops chair of the 2010 ACM SIGMOD Conference, that our workshop proposal for the 3rd International Workshop on Testing Database Systems had been approved.

Building on the two previously-held workshops in Vancouver in 2008 and in Providence in 2009, this third Workshop will continue discussions between industry and academia in order to come up with a research agenda that describes important open problems in the area of testing database systems and applications. The long-term goal is to devise new techniques that solve these problems. These techniques will reduce the cost and time to test and tune database products so that users and vendors can spend more time and energy on actual innovation.

Topics of Interest

• Testing techniques for database systems, data storage services, database applications
• Generation of synthetic data for test databases
• Generation of stochastic test models for large test matrices
• Techniques and algorithms for automatic program verification
• Maximizing code coverage of database systems/applications
• Testing the reliability and availability of database systems
• Test-modeling of database systems/applications
• Testing and designing systems that are robust to estimation inaccuracies
• Testing the efficiency of adaptive policies and components
• Minimizing, automating, and ranking of system tuning parameters
• Identifying performance bottlenecks
• Workload characterization with respect to performance metrics and engine components
• Testing data consistency Vs. availability tradeoffs in emerging systems
• Metrics for predictability of query and workload performance
• Metrics for query plan robustness
• Security and vulnerability testing
• War stories and vision papers

Proposed Workshop timelines

Here is the proposed workshop milestones dates that we have proposed to SIGMOD (subject to change):

• Submission: March 29, 2010 (Monday)
• Notification of acceptance: April 22 (Thursday)
• Camera-ready copies due: May 6 (Thursday)
• Date of workshop: June 6 (Sunday)

Shivnath Babu of Duke University and myself are the DBTEST 2010 co-chairs. Shivnath and I would like to encourage submissions from across the database and database application community; we have put in place a superb program committee and we look forward to a terrific workshop in Indianapolis this coming June. The URL for the Workshop is http://www.cs.duke.edu/dbtest2010; watch for updates over the coming months.