VLDB Panel Summary: "The Future of Data(base) Education: Is the Cow Book Dead?"

Database education is at an inflection point. With the surge of interest in all things "data", enrollments in traditional database courses are at an all time high. At the same time, the rise of Data Science as a discipline has led to the creation of new courses whose content significantly overlaps that of an introductory database course (e.g. data preparation, cleaning, SQL). Students from all across campus aspire to take data science courses, even with limited Computer Science backgrounds. This juxtaposition of content and proliferation of audiences is causing many database educators to question what we should be teaching in our data-oriented courses, and what resources we should use to teach them.