Motivation and Scope

The functionality provided by modern database management systems (DBMS), data storage services, and database applications is continuously expanding. New trends in hardware architectures, new data storage requirements, and new usage patterns drive the need for continuous innovation and expansion. As a result, these system/applications are becoming increasingly complex and difficult to validate. As a consequence, testing and tuning these system/applications is becoming increasingly expensive and are often dominating the release cycle. It is not unusual that fifty percent of the development cost is spent on testing and tuning and that several months are reserved for testing before a new release can be shipped. The first workshop on testing database systems (collocated with SIGMOD 2008) has shown that there is a huge interest of the industry to discuss problems in the area of testing database systems together with the academic community. Moreover, testing has recently gained more attention in the database community with an increasing number of conference submissions as well as a special issue of the IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin in this area. The main purpose of this workshop is to continue the discussion between industry and academia in order to come up with a research agenda that describes important open problems in the area of testing database systems/applications. The long term goal is to devise new techniques which solve these problems in order to reduce the cost and time to test and tune database products so that users and vendors can spend more time and energy on actual innovations. Obviously, the software engineering community has already worked intensively on testing related problems. However, testing DBMS/database applications imposes particular challenges and opportunities which have not been addressed in either the database or software engineering community.