Database systems for tomorrow: new challenges and research areas

Since the mid-80s, considerable progress has been achieved in relational database technology. The main achievements have been in high performance, high reliability and availability, scalability and development tools. However, the environment for database systems is rapidly changing. There are new challenges that originate from the present hardware technology achievements, as well as from new kinds of data resources that hardly conform to the well-established relational data model (e.g. data from the Web). In the paper, we present the new challenges and research areas, as well as motivations behind them.