The Cambridge Report on Database Research
Abstract
On October 19 and 20, 2023, the authors of this report convened in Cambridge, MA, to discuss the state of the database research field, its recent accomplishments and ongoing challenges, and future directions for research and community engagement. This gathering continues a long standing tradition in the database community, dating back to the late 1980s, in which researchers meet roughly every five years to produce a forward looking report. This report summarizes the key takeaways from our discussions. We begin with a retrospective on the academic, open source, and commercial successes of the community over the past five years. We then turn to future opportunities, with a focus on core data systems, particularly in the context of cloud computing and emerging hardware, as well as on the growing impact of data science, data governance, and generative AI. This document is not intended as an exhaustive survey of all technical challenges or industry innovations in the field. Rather, it reflects the perspectives of senior community members on the most pressing challenges and promising opportunities ahead.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.11259,
title = {The Cambridge Report on Database Research},
author = {Anastasia Ailamaki and Samuel Madden and Daniel Abadi and Gustavo Alonso and Sihem Amer-Yahia and Magdalena Balazinska and Philip A. Bernstein and Peter Boncz and Michael Cafarella and Surajit Chaudhuri and Susan Davidson and David DeWitt and Yanlei Diao and Xin Luna Dong and Michael Franklin and Juliana Freire and Johannes Gehrke and Alon Halevy and Joseph M. Hellerstein and Mark D. Hill and Stratos Idreos and Yannis Ioannidis and Christoph Koch and Donald Kossmann and Tim Kraska and Arun Kumar and Guoliang Li and Volker Markl and Renée Miller and C. Mohan and Thomas Neumann and Beng Chin Ooi and Fatma Ozcan and Aditya Parameswaran and Ippokratis Pandis and Jignesh M. Patel and Andrew Pavlo and Danica Porobic and Viktor Sanca and Michael Stonebraker and Julia Stoyanovich and Dan Suciu and Wang-Chiew Tan and Shiv Venkataraman and Matei Zaharia and Stanley B. Zdonik},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.11259},
year = {2025}
}