SIGMOD Invited Talk
Speaker: Jayant Haritsa, Indian Institute of Science
Title: Indian Database Research: The Journey to SIGMOD 2026
Abstract: SIGMOD 2026 marks the first time our community's flagship conference is being held in India. In this talk, we trace the evolution of Indian database research from modest beginnings, wherein only a handful of SIGMOD papers had appeared by 2000, to its current visible presence on the global map. We examine this substantive transformation from three different perspectives: academia, industry, and large-scale deployment.
Database research in Indian academia was initially confined to just a few premier institutions, but has now developed into a vibrant landscape spanning diverse universities. The technical contributions have also broadened from primarily theoretical and algorithmic advances to include the formulation of new technical problems and the development of prototype systems shaped by contemporary applications. For instance, original work has appeared on query optimizer visualization, robust query execution, holistic optimization of database applications, and testing strategies for declarative queries and database engines.
Turning to industry, early Indian engineering teams were largely limited to peripheral functions such as maintenance, documentation, and support. This marginal role was attributable to a lack of conceptual and practical training in database internals. Over the past three decades, this lacuna has been diligently addressed in both academia and production environments. As a result, today's teams contribute directly to the design and implementation of core database functionality for both in-house and cloud platforms. And not just in isolation, but extending to deep engagement with end-to-end systems architecture and performance.
Finally, India offers a compelling success story for data-driven infrastructure at population scale (1.5 billion and counting!). In particular, India Stack, a set of open APIs and digital public goods built on enterprise-scale data management systems, has enabled new digital primitives around identity, data sharing, and payments. The downstream effects have radically influenced human engagement with services across a variety of domains; as a case in point, daily transaction volumes in digital payments and capital markets rank among the highest in the world.
Taken together, these developments tell a broader story: how institutional growth, industrial capability, and nationwide deployment have combined to transform a once-limited research footprint into a multi-layered database ecosystem with global impact and societal reach.
Bio: Jayant Haritsa is on the faculty of the Department of Computational & Data Sciences and the Department of Computer Science & Automation at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, since 1993. He received his undergraduate degree from IIT Madras, and the PhD degree from U. Wisconsin -- Madison. During his academic career, he has spent industry sabbaticals at Lucent Bell Labs, IBM Research, and Microsoft Research.
Jayant is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE for his contributions to the design and implementation of database engines. He was the Program Co-Chair for VLDB 2016 and ICDE 2010, and is now General Co-Chair for SIGMOD 2026. He is a Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Madras, and was President of the ACM India Council during 2020-2022.