Dear All, At the 1st XLDB workshop we agreed to meet again in about a year, somewhere in SF Bay Area, likely at SLAC. To make this happen, it is time to start planning the 2nd XLDB workshop now. Where/when ========== I'm proposing to meet for 2 days on September 29th and 30th at SLAC. Let me know if you are planning to attend and this slot doesn't work for you (but do realize we won't be able to accommodate everybody's schedule) Program ======= Based on the feedback received last year, the style of the 1st workshop worked well, so we will try to keep it similar this year: lots of discussions and very few presentations. We (myself, K-T and few others I talked to) envision this year's workshop to be a continuation of the discussions we started last year, with the main focus on topics like: * complex analytics - commonalities between science and industry * scalability, fault tolerance and crash recovery of extremely large databases * common features needed (provenance?, uncertainty?, time travel?...) * resource allocation/management * on the fly reconfiguration and on the fly data repartitioning * [... suggestions what else welcome...] The goal would be to identify commonalities, understand and prioritize needed features and discuss path forward. We are considering having a session about war stories (LHC? PanSTARRS? EBay? others?) - if you have a large production database setup and would like to talk about your war stories related to extremely large databases, please let me know. We are also considering having a dedicated time slot for new startups (and maybe well established vendors), so... 1) If you represent a startup involved in providing extremely large database solutions and would like to speak about it, please let me know. The form of this session is to-be-decided (poster session? panel? short presentations?). 2) If you would like to see a slot dedicated to well established DBMS vendors, please let me know. Based on the feedback I received last year this seems to be less desired. Finally, we believe it'd be valuable to spend the second half of the second day on a tutorial related to the new open source database that was proposed at the Asilomar meeting. See the report: http://xldb.slac.stanford.edu/download/attachments/4784226/sciDB2008_report.pdf for more details about this meeting. We will provide more information in advance to help you decide if you want to stay or not. Organizing Committee ==================== I'm looking for 2-4 volunteers who would like to help with organizing this workshop. An up-front warning: each member of the organizing committee will be expected to do some real work (announcements, preparation, maybe moderating, etc). If you are interested, please respond directly to me. Invitations =========== I can already tell there is huge interest in this workshop, and it will be a challenge to keep it relatively small, e.g. under 70. We need to come up with a policy what criteria to use to select who should be invited. (Keep in mind that being on this list and receiving this email does _not_ guarantee getting an invite...). I think we should shoot for no more than two representatives for "bigger" sites/labs/companies, and one representative otherwise. Website ======== In the short term, up-to-date page dedicated to workshop preparation will be maintained at: http://xldb.slac.stanford.edu/display/XLDB/xldb2 Eventually we will create an official web page similar to: http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/xldb07 Comments welcome ================ If you have suggestions regarding agenda/topics to discuss, or any other comments/suggestions, please contact me or respond to this email. Based on the feedback we received, last year's meeting was a great success, which means it'll be a big challenge to make the 2nd workshop even better. I am looking forward to making this happen together with you. Best regards, Jacek -- Jacek Becla Stanford Linear Accelerator Center [log in to unmask] +1 650 926 8664