Autonomic, or self-managing, systems are a promising approach to achieve the goal of systems that are easier to use and maintain in the face of growing system complexity. A system is considered to be autonomic if it is self-configuring, self-optimizing, self-healing and/or self-protecting. The aim of the SMDB workshop is to provide a forum for researchers from both industry and academia to present and discuss ideas and experiences related to self-management and self-organization in all areas of Information Management (IM) in general. SMDB targets not only classical databases but also the new generation of storage engines such as column stores, key-value stores, and in-memory databases. Beyond databases, SMDB aims to cover autonomic aspects of data-intensive systems represented by large-scale map-reduce (e.g., Hadoop) and cloud environments, where much work on self-management is needed. Last but not least, SMDB seeks to expand its horizons to include self-management of non-traditional, new areas of IM such as social networks, distributed gaming, and peer-to-peer systems.

Research and development in database management systems has been instrumental in accomplishing some of the goals of autonomic systems by developing and incorporating strategies for physical database design, problem diagnosis, load balancing, self-tuning, and self-optimization. New challenges arising from multi-tenant databases, virtualization, cloud computing, software-as-a-service, and large data-intensive systems, such as social networks, distributed gaming, and peer-to-peer systems require new research.

Early workshops of the SMDB series focused on core topics in self-managing databases such as automated tuning and provisioning, automated problem diagnosis and recovery, and automated data protection and integration. Since 2010 the scope of the workshop has been broadened to include new topics in the core database area, such as multi-tenant databases and data management in cloud computing, but also drawing in other communities, such as, peer-to-peer computing and distributed systems. For the 2012 SMDB workshop, we want to continue to attract researchers from both the core database and other communities, such as the adaptive and event-based systems communities as enabling technologies for self-managing systems, and data-intensive internet-scale distributed systems, which should benefit from research results in SMDBs.