This interview with one of the leading researchers in the database field explores past, present, and future avenues in the database field as well as those of neighboring fields. In this respect, Ramakrishnan, now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a superb partner not only because he has been involved in both academic and business ventures, but also because he has a fresh way of thinking and articulates his thoughts clearly. The article is written in a lively style.

Topics touched on range from trivia to personal recollections, and extend to fairly sophisticated realms like thinking about the future research directions of the database community or the social responsibilities of engineers. Some of the specific topics covered include: the recent surge (or not) of deductive databases and its contribution to structured query language 3 (magic sets rewriting and incremental view maintenance); data cubes and their role beyond providing scalability (information extraction from text and social network analysis); QUIQ, the company Ramakrishnan founded at the end of the 1990s, and how he spent 20 million dollars and terminated the venture; the social responsibility of researchers (“to become more active”) in light of security and privacy issues; and his personal history (that is, how he ended up doing database research).

In summary, this article is an enjoyable personal tour of the horizon, even if you are not directly from the database or data mining community.