ct Performance and scalability have always been major aspects of the design and implementation of database management systems (DBMS). Consequentially, there is a vast number of publications addressing performance improvements for virtually every aspect of a DBMS, such as query processing, restart recovery, physical data storage, index structures, or buffer management, to only name a few. In recent years, due to the evolution of hardware and its new capabilities (e.g. vector processing or hardware transactional memory), the topic of hardware/software co-design has gained much attention. Both DBMS researchers and developers have broadened their scope from a pure (system) software programming perspective towards a more hardwareaware view. In this keynote, we will complement this trend of looking towards the hardware by considering another part of the usual software stack a DBMS is deployed in, and focus towards the application server running the user code. While the interaction and potent...