MOD

2005 marks the 31st SIGMOD conference, preceded by 5 workshops sponsored by SIGMOD's predecessor organization, SIGFIDET. The field has grown and evolved significantly over these 36 years, but the SIGMOD conference has remained throughout as one of the foremost annual events for exchanging the latest ideas and advances in data management.The SIGMOD conference is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and its Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD). Two days of the conference overlap with the Symposium on Principles of Database System (PODS), and several workshops and other events are co-located with SIGMOD.This year 455 research papers were submitted to SIGMOD for consideration, of which 431 were reviewed. (The remaining papers were eliminated due to double-blind or length violations, overlap with other papers, or author withdrawal.) There has been much discussion in recent years of improving the overall conference reviewing process, as our field grows and evolves, and demands on researchers increase. Two innovations were added to this year's reviewing process on an experimental basis for SIGMOD:•There was no limit on the number of accepted papers -- decisions were based on suitable quality alone. Nevertheless, the tally of 65 accepted papers constitutes an acceptance ratio (15%) similar to recent years.•An "author feedback" phase was added, in which authors could read their reviews and provide feedback to be used in the final decision process. Reactions to this new feature ran the spectrum from frustration to joy, but most felt it to be a worthwhile experiment.