SIGMOD investigates the development and application of database technology to support the full range of data management needs. The scope of interests and members is wide with an almost equal mix of people from industryand academia. SIGMOD sponsors an annual conference that is regarded as one of the most important in the field, particularly for practitioners.Areas of Special Interest:Active and temporal data management, data mining and models, database programming languages, databases on the WWW, distributed data management, engineering, federated multi-database and mobile management, query processing & optimization, rapid application development tools, spatial data management, user interfaces.