Strategic directions in research in theory of computing
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) - Special ACM 50th-anniversary issue: strategic directions in computing research
On the complexity of database queries (extended abstract)
PODS '97 Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems
A lower bound theorem for indexing schemes and its application to multidimensional range queries
PODS '98 Proceedings of the seventeenth ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems
The parameterized complexity of database queries
PODS '01 Proceedings of the twentieth ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems
When is the evaluation of conjunctive queries tractable?
STOC '01 Proceedings of the thirty-third annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Normal forms and syntactic completeness proofs for functional independencies
Theoretical Computer Science
Deciding first-order properties of locally tree-decomposable structures
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Parameterized complexity for the database theorist
ACM SIGMOD Record
Deciding First-Order Properties of Locally Tree-Decomposalbe Graphs
ICAL '99 Proceedings of the 26th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming
Descriptive and Parameterized Complexity
CSL '99 Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop and 8th Annual Conference of the EACSL on Computer Science Logic
Specification and Management of QoS in Real-Time Databases Supporting Imprecise Computations
IEEE Transactions on Computers
A tractability result for reasoning with incomplete first-order knowledge bases
IJCAI'03 Proceedings of the 18th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence
The birth and early years of parameterized complexity
The Multivariate Algorithmic Revolution and Beyond
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Database management systems address the need to store, retrieve, and manipulate large amounts of data in an organized fashion. The database held has grown tremendously in the last 25 years. It is reported that the database industry generated $7 billion in revenue in 1994 and is growing at a rate of 35% per year. Industrial and academic research have been instrumental to this growth. Theory has played an important role in defining the right abstractions and concepts, and providing a firm foundation for the field. In order to access effectively a large volume of data, one needs an abstract logical view of the data, which must be separate from the physical storage of data. The important first component of a database is therefore an abstract view of data (called the data model) and the accompanying specialized high-level language that is used to access the data. The second important component is the data structures that are used to store the data along with the algorithms to support the efficient translation from the logical to the physical world. The third important component is the mechanisms that allow the database to be accessed concurrently by many users, without violating its integrity. Theory has contributed to all three fronts, starting with what is undoubtedly the cornerstone of the area, the introduction and formal definition of the relational model by F.P. Codd (1970). It is a highly unusual compliment for theory when the major commercial products in the field have at their core a mathematically rigorous, formal model. Our primary aims in this paper will be to give a flavor of the types of problems that database theory addresses, and to review how research in the area has evolved over the years. At the end we will try to point to some topics that may be of interest to people in the FOCS community tempted to work in database theory.