The last decade has witnessed tremendous advances in data mining. We take a retrospective look at these developments, focusing on association rules discovery, and discuss the challenges and opportunities ahead. The full version of the paper will be made available at http://www.almaden.ibm. com/software/quest. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or special permission from the Endowment. Proceedings of the 30th VLDB Conference, Toronto, Canada, 2004 9