Forty years ago, on September 13-19 of 1981, Gran Hotel San Michele hosted the progenitor of ICDT: the Advanced Seminar on Theoretical Issues in Databases (TIDB), organized by Giorgio Ausiello, François Bancilhon, Domenico Sacca' and Nicolas Spyratos.

TIDB program included invited talks by outstanding scientists such as: Catriel Beeri, Ron Fagin, Seymour Ginsburg, Bob Kowalski, Witold Lipski, John Mylopoulos, Jean-Marie Nicolas, Christos Papadimitriou, Jan Paredaens, Yehoshua Sagiv, Mihalis Yannakakis, Carlo Zaniolo. Besides the main lectures, short talks were also given by a young (at that time) Italian scientist Carlo Batini and two promising postdocs Maurizio Lenzerini and Paolo Atzeni.

In the report about TIDB written for the EATCS Bulletin, Christos Papadimitriou said:

There was an extensive mosaic of topics covered, reflecting the state of wild fermentation in which database theory appears to be. Relational theory, concurrency control, and logic in databases were three areas that were represented quite heavily in the list of speakers. Voices of the null value problem, schema design theory, the operational approach, conceptual modeling, and software engineering issues, were also heard”.

A joint seminar on "Reminiscence of TIDB 1981" will be held next to SEBD 2021. The seminar will be organized in mixed online/in-presence sessions of invited lectures.