Hi All,

The XLDB-Europe satellite workshop organized last week
in Edinburgh was attended by 40+ people, mostly from
Europe. It was successful in many ways, and helped keep
communities on both sides of the Atlantic in touch with
each others.

Among the messages that came up strongly were needs for:
1) better understanding how people work with data,
2) educating users how to work with large data sets,
3) more sharing, both lessons learned and code,
    such as user defined functions,
4) defining common APIs,
5) a place to publish papers describing practical
    solutions related to large scale systems.

To address #1-3, we could make progress by using
tools such as the xldb forum
(http://xldb-forum.slac.stanford.edu/), but to succeed
*all of us* need to be more active. So, I strongly
encourage all of you to get involved and start posting
to this forum your lessons-learned, your problems, your
needs, your questions, your successes and frustrations.
If we manage to get to 10+ good technical posts prior
to October 15, the authors of the top three posts
(selected based on post ratings) will be rewarded at
the XLDB-2011 conference, I promise to try to arrange
a very special and unique reward!


To address #4, we will start by trying to define
a standard array interface. If we manage to make
sufficient progress by XLDB-2011, we will announce
it there.


To address #5 we are considering two options:
co-locating XLDB-2012 with the SSDBM conference,
or opening the XLDB conference for peer-reviewed
talks and papers with proceedings, preferably
through a highly recognized publisher.


Many thanks to the main organizer of this event:
Malcolm Atkinson and his team, as well as others
who contributed - it was a very well organized event!


Malcolm is also coordinating writing the report from
the workshop, we will do our best to have the report
available for you prior to the XLDB-2011 in October.

Regards,
Jacek