This volume contains an invited paper, two invited tutorials and 26 contributed papers that were selected for presentation at the Nineteenth ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS), which was held May 15--17, 2000 in Dallas, USA in conjunction with the 2000 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data.
The contributed papers were selected by the Program Committee out of 119 submissions. Most of these papers present preliminary reports of continuing research; they have been read by the Program Committee but not formally refereed. It is anticipated that most of them will appear in a more polished form in scientific journals.
For the PODS'2000 Best Paper Award the Program Committee selected the paper ``Auditing Boolean Attributes'' by Jon Kleinberg, Christos Papadimitriou and Prabhakar Raghavan. For the PODS'2000 Best Newcomer Paper Award we selected the paper ``Verification of Relational Transducers for Electronic Commerce'' by Marc Spielmann. My warmest congratulations to the authors.
The Program Committee would like to thank all those who submitted extended abstracts for consideration, those colleagues who helped in the evaluation (listed separately), and the sponsoring organizations for their assistance and support. I would like to thank the members of the Program Committee for their hard and conscientious work. The Program Committee meeting was held in electronic form. The software used was ConfMan, an excellent PC management package designed and implemented by Pal Halvorsen, Ketil Lund and Thomas Preuss (see http://confman.unik.no). We thank the authors of ConfMan for making the system available to us. We also thank the Austrian Science Fund FWF (Project N Z29-INF) for financially supporting essential PC tasks. Finally, special thanks go to the PC Assistant Katrin Seyr and to the Proceedings Chair Bertram Ludäscher.
Georg Gottlob, Program Committee Chair