The DB community is extremely HUGE and still growing. IMHO, it seems too ambitious and thus it is difficult to keep track of the field. However, maybe just because of this it is more interesting and exciting.

In the Claremont Report on Database Research, it mentioned many interesting research area

• management of uncertain information
• data privacy and security
• human centric interactions with data
• social network and Web 2.0
• personalization and contextualization of query- and search-related tasks
• Streaming and networked data

IMHO, it a revolution in DB research area by Web 2.0 and Scientific Computing

1. Revisiting DB Engines: System Design Challenge
   • Workload is different such as web 2.0
   • Cluster is rising because of Map-Reduce
   • hardware is evolving
2. Declarative Programming for Emerging Platforms
   • New language model? Ruby On Rails’s success of ORM
3. The Interplay of Structured and Unstructured Data
   • Information Extraction: connection with IR & ML. Sematics of the Data.
   • Information Integration: Query Large Distributed Heterogeneous Data.
   • Created Data by User: It is an extremely attracting problem in the real world application.
     • Usability
     • Feedback Loop
     • Conflict Data
4. Cloud Data Services
   • IMHO, it is just an alternative name of parallel and distributed computing.
   • What is the difference? The difference is that ordinary people now can easily utilize large cluster resources easily via Map/Reduce paradigm.
5. Mobile Applications and Virtual Worlds
   • Many Applications: But what is the problem?
   • Privacy in Data Sharing: a HOT research area. There are two sessions in VLDB 2009 and SIGMOD 2009.

The Note seems in a mess. The point is that web 2.0’s challenge.