Data Management is a diverse research area focusing on the efficient, scalable, usable, and secure management of big data. Classically, data management has focused on structured data, but it now also includes a variety of complex data types and settings. These include textual data, semi-structured data, graph-structure data, and continuous data streams, as well as data (regardless of type) that is incomplete, imprecise, or which represents probabilistic assertions rather than known facts.

Data management research is increasingly multi-disciplinary, including aspects of theory, machine learning, operating systems, programming languages, information retrieval, and many others. At its core, data management seeks to enhance the capabilities of systems that deal with data, and, together with statistics and machine learning, is one of the pillars of the emerging discipline of Data Science.