Data management: 25 years of forecasts

In October 2013, the eighth meeting of researchers in the field of databases was held. The first such meeting took place in February 1988, so that 25 years passed between them. After each meeting, a report was published containing an overview of the current state of the field and a research program for the nearest future, a kind of set of forecasts for the development of research activities. This paper looks at the most interesting forecasts from the reports of the research meetings, discusses how they proved to be valid, to what extent they were true or not. Among the various problems of database technology under consideration are the following: the role of specialized hardware in building effective DBMS; SQL and database applications; perspectives of object-relational extensions; distributed heterogeneous database systems; databases and Web; databases and data warehouses, OLAP and data mining; component organization of DBMS; query optimization criteria; self-tuning and self-management of DBMS; DBMS architecture and new hardware capabilities: SSD, non-volatile memory, massively multithreaded processors; specialized DBMS; data fusion and data spaces; the Big Data problem and the response to it in the database community; architectural shifts in computing.