Report on the Sixth International Workshop on Cloud Data Management (CloudDB 2014)

The workshop series on Cloud Data Management (CloudDB) was held successfully from 2009 to 2013, co-located with the ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) [1, 3–6]. The sixth International Workshop on Cloud Data Management was held in Chicago, IL, USA onMarch 31, 2014, co-located with the 30th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) [2]. CloudDB is dedicated to address the challenges in managing big data in the cloud computing environment, and identifying information of value to business, science, government, and society, and it continues serving as a premier forum for researchers and practitioners to present research progress and share ideas in the cloud data management area. Data management is one of the most important research areas in cloud computing. The huge volumes of data in cloud computing environments pose big infrastructure challenges, including data storage at Petabyte scale, massive parallel query execution, facilities for analytical processing, and online query processing. Meanwhile, the emergence of large data centers and computer clusters has created a new business model, cloud-based computing, for the provision of large-scale computer facilities, where businesses and individuals can rent storage and computing capacities, rather than make significant capital investments to construct. Cloud-based data storage and management is a rapidly expanding business. Whilst these emerging services have substantially reduced the cost of data storage and delivery, there is significant complexity involved in ensuring that they can sustain consistent and reliable operations under peak loads. A cloud-based environment has technical requirements to manage data center virtualization, lower cost and boost reliability by consolidating systems in the cloud. In addition, cloud systems ideally should be geographically dispersed, both to reduce their vulnerability to natural disasters and other catastrophes and to bring data and computation closer to a possibly global user base. This trend brings rise to new and complex technical challenges in the areas of distributed data interoperability and mobility. This year, the program committee accepted ten papers from nineteen submissions, by authors from Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, Japan, USA and Switzerland. The program covered a variety of topics, including quality of services, query processing, system architecture, and benchmarking. In addition, the program included two invited keynote talks from leading cloud computing researchers. Many people contributed to the success of this year’s CloudDB. First, we would like to thank all authors for submitting their contributions and all attendees for being generous and warm-hearted in all interactions. We would also like to express our deepest gratitude to the program committee members who worked hard in reviewing papers and providing suggestions for improvements. We also give special thanks to our keynote speakers, Geoffrey Fox and Xiaodong Zhang. Finally, we would express our great appreciation to Beihang University, Renmin University of China and Emory University for their supports.