PODS 2026: Call for Research Papers

The Principles of Database Systems (PODS) symposium series, held in conjunction with the SIGMOD conference series, is a premier annual forum for the communication of new advances in the theoretical foundations of data management. The 2026 conference will be held in Bengaluru, India, on May 31 - June 05, 2026.

Mission

The PODS community aims to provide a solid scientific basis for methods, techniques, and solutions for data management challenges. It develops new ways of advancing data management to reflect the rich landscape of data requirements in applications nowadays. The goal is to develop solutions that ensure high levels of efficiency, scalability, usability, expressiveness, robustness, security, clarity, and privacy.

Scope

PODS seeks scientific articles that present principled contributions to modeling, application, and system building in the context of data management. Articles might be based on theoretical results, new concepts and frameworks, experimental work, or rigorous analysis of important industry artifacts. PODS pays special attention to those papers that help integrate data management techniques within broader computer science.

Topics of Interest

Topics that fit the interests of the symposium include, but are not limited to:

• Database processing: Query evaluation, query optimization, schema management, distributed data processing, approximate data processing
• Database design: Data models, query languages, schemas, constraints
• Database access: Data structures, access methods, concurrency, transactions
• Data quality: Data cleaning, data discovery, data exploration
• Data analysis: Data mining, machine learning, information extraction, data streams
• Uncertainty: Incompleteness, inconsistency, ontological query answering, semi-structured data
• Interoperability: Mappings and views, data integration, data exchange, ontology-based data access
• Responsible data management: Access control, privacy, security, verification, ethical aspects of data management
• Connections between database principles and other disciplines
• Human-database interaction: data summarization, data visualization, explanation for database queries

Submission Site

https://www.easychair.org/my/conference?conf=pods2026

Submission Format

LaTeX users must format their submission using the standard ACM "acmsmall" proceedings stylesheet: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template

They must use the following class declaration:

\documentclass[acmsmall,review,anonymous]{acmart}

A submission can be up to 15 pages, not including references, plus unlimited space for references. Additional details may be included in a clearly marked appendix, of unlimited length, that should be incorporated at submission time; online appendices are not allowed. However, an appendix will be read at the discretion of the program committee.

Papers that are longer than 15 pages or do not cohere with the required format style risk rejection without consideration of their merits. The results of a submitted paper must be unpublished and not submitted elsewhere.

Authors of an accepted paper will be expected to sign copyright release forms and accepted papers will be published in a PODS 2026 issue of the PACMMOD journal. Authors of papers published in the PACMMOD issues of PODS 2026 will be invited to present their work at the SIGMOD/PODS conference.

Double-anonymous Reviewing

PODS 2026 will use a lightweight double-anonymous reviewing process. This means that submissions must adhere to the following:

• Author names and institutions must be omitted.
• References to the authors’ own related work should be in the third person.
• Acknowledgements, grant numbers, and links to submitted papers in public repositories will not be allowed.

However, authors should feel free to disseminate their ideas or draft versions of their paper as they normally would. For instance, authors may post drafts of their papers on the web or give talks on their research ideas.

Important Dates

FIRST SUBMISSION CYCLE:

• Abstract deadline: June 3, 2025
• Full paper submission deadline: June 10, 2025
• Rebuttal: July 29 - August 1, 2025
• Initial notification: August 11, 2025
• Revision submission: August 25, 2025
• Final notification: September 1, 2025

SECOND SUBMISSION CYCLE:

• Abstract deadline: December 3, 2025
• Full paper submission deadline: December 10, 2025
• Rebuttal: January 26 - 29, 2025
• Initial notification: February 8, 2025
• Revision submission: February 22, 2026
• Final notification: March 1, 2026

All deadlines are 11:59 PM AoE