FORMATS '26 — Sunday, May 31, 2026.

1st International Workshop on Data FORMATS for Modern Architectures and Workloads

Where Research Meets Practice.

Sponsored by and held in conjunction with ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2026 in Bengaluru, India.

Topics of Interest

FORMATS 2026 invites contributions on all aspects of data formats and format-dependent operational considerations. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Table formats design and evolution, new data types support, workload-aware maintenance, intelligent caching, adaptive indexing, interoperability across engines, and logical vs. physical independence.
  • File formats design and evolution, metadata organization, columnar or rowgroup layouts, workload-specific layouts, and reconfigurability.
  • Storage systems optimized for file operations, computation pushdowns, and utilization of emerging hardware.
  • New data layouts tailored for in-memory and storage operations.
  • Novel data encodings that improve compression ratios and operational efficiency.
  • Data access patterns and optimizations for point lookups, range scans, sequential, and random access.
  • I/O efficiency for analytics, transactional and vector databases, ML pipelines, and adjacent use cases.
  • Practical considerations for scalability and deployment in large-scale and cloud environments.

Submission Guidelines

  • Paper format: Use the 2-column ACM Proceedings format (LaTeX, Word, Overleaf) adopted by SIGMOD '26.
  • Paper length: Limit submissions to 3 pages excluding references. Accepted papers receive 4 pages, excluding references.
  • Review model: Single-anonymous; include author names and affiliations.
  • Conflicts of interest: Declare conflicts per the SIGMOD '26 guidelines.
  • Submission website: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/FORMATS2026

Please ensure submissions clearly articulate innovations, evaluation methodology, and implications for future systems.


The FORMATS workshop will publish its proceedings independently of the SIGMOD Companion volume. Accepted papers will appear in the FORMATS workshop proceedings, and will not be included in the SIGMOD Companion proceedings.

Important Dates

  • Submission deadline: March 08, 2026 (AoE).
  • Notification: March 23, 2026 April 1, 2026.
  • Camera-ready deadline: To be announced soon.
  • Workshop date: Sunday, May 31, 2026.

Important update on ACMs new open access publishing model for 2026 ACM Conferences!

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