Mobile Data Management - A Dozen Years Later

In 1999 I had the honor of presenting a Keynote talk entitled "Databases Unplugged: Challenges in Ubiquitous Data Management" at the inaugural MDM conference in Hong Kong. In that talk I spoke about the anticipated ubiquity of mobile devices and mobile applications and predicted some of the data management research challenges that could be foreseen from this sea change in the computational landscape. My views at the time were in sync with the influential Asilomar Report on Database Research [1], published in 1998, to which I contributed. The Asilomar report featured mobile devices as a "major driver" for the data management research agenda and predicted that "In ten years, billions of people will be using the Web, but a trillion "gizmos" will also be connected to the Web." Despite this optimism, The research agenda I described in my MDM talk [2] was driven in many ways by what I saw as the expected limitations of the mobile environment. Among these were: intermittent connectivity, poor battery life, and low-function user interfaces. Thus, my expectation was that technologies such as synchronization and conflict resolution, broadcast-based data dissemination, micro-kernel database systems and context-aware prefetching were technologies that would play a central role in making such devices usable as data management platforms. Rolling the clock forward twelve years, it appears that the Asilomar prediction of the number of connected devices was overly optimistic by about 3 orders of magnitude, and the technical limitations I was concerned about were substantially mitigated by tremendous innovation in mobile devices and mobile user interfaces as well as massive global investment in wireless infrastructure. On the other hand, we were both right about the huge impact of mobile computing on the way people acquire, interact with, and share information, and the fact that the ubiquity of such devices would have profound implications for data management. Undeterred by the paper trail outlined above, in this talk I plan to survey the state of the mobile data management field as it stands twelve years later. I'll review progress in areas such as sensor networks, integration with cloud computing, and location-based services. I'll also discuss what I see as a fundamental game changer brought about by mobile technology the closer integration of people into the entire data management lifecycle [3]. Social computing, crowd sourcing, and hyper-personalization are examples of ways in which the personalized nature of mobile devices is changing the way that we interact with information. I'll argue that such human-centric concerns will cause a rethinking of systems architectures and their components, and will require new ways of thinking about query processing, data quality and data-intensive applications. And if I get to do this again in 2023, we'll see how that turns out.