The 15th BTW conference on "Database Systems for Business, Technology, and Web" (BTW 2013) of the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) took place from March 11th to March 15th, 2013 at the Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg, Germany. Over 25 years, the BTW conference has been the central forum of the German database community. At this bi-annual conference, not only scientists but also practitioners and users exchange information on many topics of database and information technology.
Around 240 professors, lecturers, students and researchers met in Magdeburg to discuss latest projects and developments in the field of data management. Throughout the week, several keynotes, breakout sessions and plenary discussions took place. Amongst the keynote speakers were Paul Larson (Microsoft Research) and Gregor Hackenbroich (SAP AG).
The conference was organized by Prof. Dr. Gunter Saake from the University of Magdeburg.
SAP functioned as the conference’s platin sponsor. This includes amongst other things, mentioning in the press releases, advert in the conference program, honorary conference tickets, and an exhibition area at the conference’s premises. SAP University Alliances and the University Competence Center Magdeburg were present with a booth to inform the conference attendees about current curriculum projects and the latest product innovations. SAP HANA was positioned prominently during the whole conference. This includes amongst other things: HANA Academy, HANA Use Cases, HANA One, SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA, and the HANA Essentials book by Jeffrey Word.
Impression from the conference
Prof. Dr. Gunter Saake, Conference Chair
Currently, new technologies, such as main-memory databases and massive parallel hardware reshape the database product landscape. Some very innovative technologies originate from research groups and companies in Germany. The Conference on Database Systems for Business, Technology, and Web (BTW) is the bi-annual prime research event for database technology of the German research community. This year’s conference gave the opportunity to discuss the newest developments in these technology areas, building key technologies to handle "Big Data", which is identified as one of the future challenges for guaranteeing a technology leadership in information processing. The HANA main-memory database of SAP is an excellent example showing how fast such technology breakthroughs move into successful products.
Marcus Paradies, SAP AG
The BTW conference series, which has been held in 2013 in Magdeburg, is the most important conference for the German-speaking data management community. With a very diverse program covering research contributions as well as business insights from major data management vendors, the conference has attracted more than 300 attendees from all over the world. The two talks about the SAP HANA database and ongoing research projects at SAP were a great success and many fruitful discussions followed after the presentations. Moreover, it seems that the development of the SAP HANA database has been an initiator for extensive research in the areas in-memory computing and columnar databases. Interesting to note is that even research projects with the SAP HANA database, such as the implementation of graph processing technology into the SAP HANA database, received very good responses various experts from the research community as well as from other data management vendors.
