Thomas Haigh: "A veritable bucket of facts" origins of the data base management system. 33-49
Event reports
Monica Scannapieco, Laure Berti-Equille: Report from the First and Second International Workshops on Information Quality in Information Systems: IQIS 2004 and IQIS 2005 in conjunction with ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conferences. 50-52
Thomas Schwarz, Mark Manasse: Report on the 7th Workshop on Distributed Data and Structures: (WDAS 2006). 53-55
Marianne Winslett: Raghu Ramakrishnan speaks out on deductive databases, what lies beyond scalability, how he burned through $20M briskly, why we should reach out to policymakers, and more. 77-85
Gerhard Weikum: The database research group at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics. 42-47
Event reports
Juan Trujillo: A report on the first international workshop on best practices of UML: (BP-UML'05). 48-50
Rajendra Bose, Ian T. Foster, Luc Moreau: Report on the International Provenance and Annotation Workshop: (IPAW'06) 3-5 May 2006, Chicago. 51-53
Brian F. Cooper, Roger S. Barga: Report on SciFlow 2006: the IEEE international workshop on workflow and data flow for scientific applications. 54-56
Distinguished database profiles
Marianne Winslett: Jennifer Widom speaks out: on luck, what constitutes success, when to get out of an area, the importance of choosing the right husband, outlandish vacations, how hard it is to be an assistant professor, and more. 57-65
Volume 35, Number 4, December 2006
Avigdor Gal: Why is schema matching tough and what can we do about it? 2-5
Diego R. Llanos Ferraris: TPCC-UVa: an open-source TPC-C implementation for global performance measurement of computer systems. 6-15
Marianne Winslett: Gerome Miklau speaks out on his SIGMOD distinguished dissertation award, how great it is to be a professor, and more. 65-68
Marianne Winslett: Yannis Ioannidis speaks out on database research funding in Europe, the importance of being uncertain, teaching as show business, the history of histograms, and more. 69-76