I am indebted to several members of the ADVIS Research Group. I feel particularly lucky that Don Lambe accepted my invitation to be production director for DiSC. It is thanks to his enthusiasm, technical wizardry, good humor, and dedication that most of the contents of the first issue of DiSC (including the videos of the SIGMOD keynote talks) were processed, assembled, and packaged with good taste and precision. Nastaran Baradaran helped in countless ways being meticulous and cheerful even under pressure. Rahul Battacharya designed the DiSC logo and animation. I would also like to thank the CS lab managers Mike Voorhis and Jesse Banning for technical assistance.

I would like to thank the SIGMOD and PODS general chairs and program committee chairs, Pam Drew, Alberto Mendelzon, Laura Haas (also DiSC associate editor), and Jan Paredaens, and the SIGMOD proceedings editor, Ashutosh Tiwary, for their prompt assistance. Pam Drew also made the necessary arrangements for the (analog) video capture of the keynote talks.

I am also grateful to several people: The DiSC associate editors and in particular Michael Ley for allowing us to use the DBLP bibliography, Luis Gravano and Divesh Srivastava for gathering the SIGMOD demos, Aidong Zhang, for assembling the ACM Academic/Industrial Workshop presentations, and Curt Dyreson for contributing to the name of DiSC. Les King from IBM for giving us access to the DB2 Universal Database and Connect Personal Editions and associated papers. The organizers of the various workshops and in particular Panos Chrysanthis and Stavros Papastavrou for the NSF IDM '98 workshop materials. Heather Levell from the ACM for providing logistic help. Dennis Ahlgrim for designing the cover and imprint of DiSC. Knut Haakon Flottorp for contributing to preliminary discussions on that design.

I gratefully acknowledge the VLDB endowment for allowing the inclusion of the proceedings of VLDB '98, and IBM and NSF for providing partial financial support to DiSC and to the ADVIS Research Group, respectively.

Finally, I am thankful to all the authors who contributed the electronic versions of their papers and especially to those who provided other materials that are unique to DiSC, such as their presentations and snapshots of their demos. I would also like to thank Dave Patterson and Bill Gates for allowing their talks to be included in DiSC.

Isabel Cruz
Founding Editor

Worcester, April 28, 1999