We assembled the technical program to give Ph.D. students an opportunity to present their research ideas in a premier international research venue. The resulting program, consisting of 12 papers accepted out of the 18 submissions we received, presents a representative sample of relevant topics in database research. It included contributions from young researchers from America, Asia, and Europe. This year's program also included a keynote talk by Tim Kraska (MIT). The keynote provided guidance to Ph.D. students on successful strategies for pursuing a career in research and discussed novel issues and challenges in machine learning in and for database systems. Due to the pandemic situation, only three of the 12 Ph.D. students were able to attend the conference and workshop in person. To accommodate speakers in their time zones, we split the schedule into virtual and local sessions. Additionally, we offered two forms of mentorship. We generated a mentor-mentee mapping between authors and PC members for individual feedback sessions based on the submitted paper and review. We further connected the attendees with well established members of the VLDB community for general questions about research and the community. We thank Felix Naumann and Luna Dong, the VLDB 2021 PC chairs, and Pinar Tözün and Philippe Bonnet, the general chairs, who entrusted us with this role. We also acknowledge the great support of the whole local and technical organizing team. Finally, we thank the workshop program committee, who did a great job evaluating the papers and writing constructive feedback for the authors. We believe the event gave Ph.D. students an excellent opportunity to share and exchange research ideas with experienced researchers and become members of the friendly and welcoming VLDB community. We wish all participants the very best for their research!
PC Chairs Philip Bernstein, Microsoft Research Tilmann Rabl, Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam