Database systems research: dead or alive? The answer may be backpropagation!
Much has been said recently about the future of database systems research. Mike Stonebraker has loudly complained about how core systems papers are disappearing at an alarming rate from SIGMOD and VLDB. He called it Fear #1 in a recent talk. Another excellent and a more optimistic view of the database research was published by Mike Caferalla and Chris Ré . So what is going on: Is there or is there not an issue with database systems research? While in my mind there is no doubt that there is a rich future for database systems research, it is definitely the case that publishing systems papers has gotten much harder. There is undoubtedly an urgent issue to solve with reviewing papers. One key root cause is that there is a lot of bad reviewing in our conferences. And, there is no long-term mechanism to deal with bad reviewing. With the gigantic PCs that we now have and a bandwagon approach to following-the-latest-trend (Mike makes a point about this too in his talk), the way to game