The 
 Claremont 
 Report 
 on 
 Database

In late May, 2008, a group of database researchers, architects, users and pundits met at the Claremont Resort in Berkeley, California to discuss the state of the research field and its impacts on practice. This was the seventh meeting of this sort in twenty years, and was distinguished by a broad consensus that we are at a turning point in the history of the field, due both to an explosion of data and usage scenarios, and to major shifts in computing hardware and platforms. Given these forces, we are at a time of opportunity for research impact, with an unusually large potential for influential results across computing, the sciences and society. This report details that discussion, and highlights the group's consensus view of new focus areas, including new database engine architectures, declarative programming languages, the interplay of structured and unstructured data, cloud data services, and mobile and virtual worlds. We also report on discussions of the community's growth, including suggestions for changes in community processes to move the research agenda forward, and to enhance impact on a broader audience. Over the last twenty years, small groups of database researchers have periodically gathered to assess the state of the field and propose directions for future research [BDD+89, SSU91, ASU95, AZ+96, BBC+98, AAB03]. Reports of these meetings were written to serve various functions: to foster debate within the database research community, to explain research directions to external organizations, and to help focus community efforts on timely challenges. This year, the tenor of the meeting was unusual and quite clear: database research and the data management industry are at a turning point, with unusually rich opportunities for technical advances, intellectual achievement, entrepreneurship and impact on science and society. Given the large number of opportunities, it is important for the research community to address issues that maximize impact within the field, across computing, and in external fields as well. The sense of change in the air emerged quickly in the meeting, as a function of several factors: 1. Breadth of excitement about Big Data. In recent years, the number of communities working with large volumes of data has grown considerably, to include not only traditional enterprise applications and Web search, but also " e-science " efforts (in astronomy, biology, earth science, etc.), digital entertainment, natural language processing, social network analysis, and more. While the user base for traditional Database Management Systems (DBMSs) is growing …