Message from the VLDWH Workshop Chair

ver the last few years data warehousing, data mining and analytical online processing emerged to form a new paradigm for the storage and analysis of data in business environments and increasingly in scientific environments. With the use of these technologies in a wide variety of application, the necessity for highly scalable and fast data management tools capable of handling multiple terabytes of data in a data warehousing environment became apparent. Additionally, the growth of the Internet and Grid computing lead to the re-emergence of distributed, parallel computing platforms and to a trend to perform computing task in a decentralized manner, efficiently utilizing resources in multiple geographic locations. All this led to the emergence of research on the implementation and management of very large data warehouses and now includes such areas as zero-latency data warehousing for simulation and forecasting, distributed data warehouses and data mining for medical applications as well as for high energy physics and web warehousing as a foundation for the development of searchable archives of web content. O