In May 1989, a rst workshop entitled "Grundlagen von Datenbanken" was organized by founder members of a newly established GI working group ("Arbeitskreis") with the same name. Nobody among the organizers and the numerous attendees of this initial event even dared to hope at that time that "GvDB" would still be alive both as a working group (by now the oldest in GI) as well as a regular annual event in 2018! As young (and not so young) DB scientists will come together for the 30st time this year in Wuppertal, looking back to 1989 and reviewing what has been achieved since then may be a worthwhile activity.